Moon Over Park Avenue

We were at Arches National Park at ‘Park Avenue’, the first real pullout you hit after the entrance to Arches, shooting sunset down into the canyon. That’s the view everyone comes for, the tall walls of Courthouse Towers catching the last warm light, so that’s where all the tripods were pointed, mine included.

At some point I turned around. Low behind us, over the rock walls on the entrance to Park Avenue, there was the moon. Just a thin sliver of it sitting in a plain sky. The shot everybody had driven out for was in front of me, and this quiet little thing was at my back where nobody was looking.

I turned around and took the shot, and when I started working on it the color wasn’t doing anything for me. The whole image was really about one shape against an empty sky. So I converted it to black and white and let that sliver carry the frame on its own.

There’s almost nothing going on in it. No drama, no big sky, just a curve of light with a lot of rock and empty space around it. Everyone else was pointed at the canyon, and the shot I kept was the one behind me.

More of my photography at imagesbyericbrown.com or on Instagram .