Varina is the second featured photographer in my series on Topophilia, finding your sense of place in the canyons of southern Utah.

In asking other photographers about what draws them to southern Utah, a theme that runs through their answers is the solitude.  During my exchange of emails with Varina Patel, she said it very well:

“Can you think of a spot where you can stand for an hour, and not hear a single car pass by, a single plane fly overhead, or another human voice besides your own? You can find countless spots like that in Utah.”

I think many landscape photographers need that solitude as surely as they need oxygen or water, and they begin taking images as a way to search out and capture that feeling.  Perhaps that’s why so many of us feel at home in southern Utah.

Much of southern Utah is located on the Colorado Plateau, which was uplifted during a series of relatively violent geologic events.  Despite the nature of its creation, the landscapes of southern Utah are amazingly elegant.  That elegance is what drew me to Varina’s photography.  Her compositions are simple, with brilliant lines and colors, and are technically perfect.  Her photos draw you in, letting the lines lead you through the frame, inviting you into the landscape.  Looking at her portfolio, it is evident that Varina–like many other photographers who have fallen victim to the landscapes of the Colorado Plateau–feels a deep connection with the earth.

Varina, with her husband Jay, run multiple workshops, including day workshops on a method of post-processing they have dubbed intelligent HDR (or iHDR).  The idea is to process the parts of the image that actually need an HDR treatment, rather than the whole frame.  The latter has a tendency to make an image look garish or unnatural.  Her expertise in post-processing is evident in looking at her images, and I hope I can achieve that level of understanding…someday!

Like Scott Bacon, Varina told me to choose which image of hers I would like to display.  I chose this image, taken in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.  Varina gave me a fantastic description of the image, and of the landscape.  Rather than me try to butcher her words by paraphrasing, I’ll share her sentiments:

“…this is a spectacular location. It’s in the Southwest region of Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument. The Native Americans called it ‘The Land of the Sleeping Rainbows.’

The first time we visited this location, we stopped near this spot, and got out of the car. We stood there in awe of the view. Those bands of color you see in the mountains stretch for miles in every direction… and the landscape here is completely unpredictable. We’ve visited this spot several times now, and we’ve only explored a small piece of it. I think I could shoot here for weeks on end, and never get tired of it.

On this particular day, we arrived in time to scout locations before we set up our cameras. We could see these storm clouds rolling in, and were pretty excited about the prospect for some nice shots. The storm clouds were moving fast, and the light was incredible. I found a patch of cracked earth, and used that as my foreground – in an attempt to give the viewer a more intimate view of the location… as if they could step right into the photo.”

You can visit Varina’s website here, learn more about her workshops here, and subscribe to her blog here.