Dawn at Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park in Utah.

Dawn at  Mesa Arch  in Canyonlands National Park in Utah. The arch is an amazing natural stone arch perched at the edge of a cliff with vast views of the spectacular landscape in the distance.

The hardest part about trying to photograph scenery like this is the sheer vastness of the image. The view goes on and on, and trying to make sense of all the elements is quite a challenge.

I was travelling with my friend and fellow photographer  Peter Eastway having both been speakers at the Wedding Portrait Photographers International conference in Las Vegas.  We arrived in the dark, the carpark being about 1 km away and set up waiting for the first light the break over the horizon. Never having been there before, we only had our calculations to work out where we were expecting the sun to rise, and set up our cameras using our best guess. As we would be photographing directly into the rising sun, I knew that the window of opportunity to get a decent shot would be very narrow, and that as soon as the sun was fully up over the horizon, the scene would be rendered flat and uninteresting. Our only chance would be to capture the image at the very start of the sunrise.

It is nice when you think about a shot before hand, make a plan, and everything works out pretty much the way you thought it would. The light was great, and lit up the landscape to highlight the mountains, and rock structures in the distance, and brought out the texture on the canyon floor. The light hitting the underside of the arch and the rocks below it caused the whole structure to glow and I was very happy with the shot. There was the usual flurry of activity, trying to get as many variations as possible before the light flattened out, but on this occasion, the initial image that I made was the best one. This image looks amazing printed onto a high gloss metall print and is available in our Art print gallery here