Foto Friday: Framed Factory Butte
Framed Factory Butte. Hanksville, Utah. Copyright 2024 Eric D. Brown.
There’s a spot out near Factory Butte where a small hole in a rock formation lines up perfectly with the butte itself. It’s not an arch in any grand sense; it’s barely big enough to shoot through. Most people who visit Factory Butte don’t know it exists, and even if they did, they’d probably walk right past it.
I didn’t get this on the first try. I came back a few times, working out the timing for when the first light would hit the upper ridgelines of the butte while still being low enough to create some depth in the foreground rock. Sunrise out here changes fast, so you’ve got a narrow window where the light is warm on the butte, but the framing rock is still in shadow, and that contrast is what makes the whole composition work.
The opening in the rock is small enough that I had to focus stack to keep both the foreground edges and the butte sharp. When you’re shooting through something that close to the lens, you can’t get both planes in focus with a single exposure; the depth of field just isn’t there. So it was a few frames at different focus points, blended together.
What I like about this image is that it does something Factory Butte photos rarely do. Most shots of the butte are wide open with big sky, vast badlands, the butte standing alone in the middle of it all. And those are great. But framing it through this little rock window gives it a completely different feel. It becomes more intimate, more like you’re discovering it rather than surveying it.
That’s what keeps me going back to Hanksville. There’s always another angle, another piece of the landscape that nobody’s bothered to look at yet.
More of my photography at imagesbyericbrown.com or on Instagram .
