The World Below

We found it by accident. Red Cliffs backed straight onto our subdivision in St. George and we were in it constantly, and one early spring afternoon we’d gone off-trail up a side canyon off the Red Reef trail and there it was: a red sandstone boulder still holding water from the winter, carrying patches of moss in half a dozen colours and textures, sitting in dappled light.

I didn’t have what I needed with me. We came back the next weekend specifically for it.

The stack is sixty frames. Shooting that close leaves you a sliver of depth of field and no way to get front-to-back sharpness in a single exposure, so the camera fires the sequence and the depth gets assembled afterwards. It was one of my first attempts at it and I’d approach it differently now.

Up close there were ants working through it and signs of small spiders, and not much else you could see — which is most of why I wanted it. It reads like an aerial photograph of somewhere with its own weather.

We went back later in the season and the moss had dried to dormancy and the whole thing was ordinary again. The magic comes back when the water does.

It’s the same Red Cliffs Desert Reserve where I later made Desert Tortoise.