Moonscape Overlook Utah: Capturing the Lunar Badlands in Morning and Evening Light
Moonscape Overlook #1-Morning
Riding Out the Gale: Light and Texture on the Moonscape Overlook
This location is beginning to get popular, even though it requires specific intention to get there. It’s near Hanksville, Utah, but you need to off-road for quite a few miles to get there. Most people drive right past this stunning, target rich valley of badlands, mesas and other fantastical formations on their way to Capitol Reef National Park. If you do decide to explore the area, the first half of the side trip to Moonscape Overlook is on a pretty well graded dirt road, but after the turnoff to get up to the overlook, it gets rougher. My van made it by taking it extremely slow and I wouldn’t want to do it again without being in a high clearance vehicle. although 4-wheel drive isn’t really necessary as long as the roads are dry. Some of the other interesting features here are Factory Butte, The Mars Research Station, Bentonite Hills, Long Dong Silver and The Angel of Death.
Arriving at the lookout, the winds were very strong and howled through the shoot and overnight with an intensity that made framing up my shots feel like an extreme sport. But the reward for riding out a gale on a lunar plateau is the absolute stillness you find when the atmosphere finally settles, letting the low-angle morning sun start carving raw, sculptural shapes out of the gray bentonite clay spread out for miles below. These two images were captured within a few feet of each other, just pointed the camera in different directions to frame where the light and compositions were best.
Looking back at these frames captured three years ago, I leaned heavily on the versatility and capability of my Olympus gear. The Olympus IBIS of my EM-1 Mk II saved my bacon during the evening shoot with sustained gale winds of 40-50 mph! Not sure exactly since I didn’t have my amateur meteorological station with mebut I’ve only experienced such high winds a couple of other times, both in Death Valley. In the first shot, captured at 85mm using my M.Zuiko 40–150mm f2.8 Pro lens in the morning, the light rakes horizontally across the rolling ripples of the landscape, catching the crests of the clay hills and throwing deep, crisp shadows into the rills.
Shifting gears to the evening shoot in the bottom photo, that howling evening perspective with the 12–40mm f2.8 Pro lens set to 40mm, the mood changes entirely. The blue-hour light softens, wrapping itself around the intricate, drainage-carved textures of the earth like liquid silver while the wind tried to rip the tripod right out from under my hands.
Moonscape Overlook #2-Evening
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