Skull Rock

Author's Comments

Skull Rock is one of those subjects that tests your patience with the obvious. The formation is genuinely striking - the eye sockets are real, the resemblance is not a stretch - but it sits ten feet from the road, and by ten in the morning there is a line of people waiting to pose inside the eye holes. I do not begrudge them. I just do not want them in my frame. The answer is to be there at first light. February or November, when the desert mornings come in cold and the sun rises at a low enough angle to rake across the granite and articulate every weathered pit and crack. The skull itself reads best from slightly below and to the side, where the shadows do the work of carving the face out of the stone. Straight-on flattens it. Most people shoot it straight on. What I have come to appreciate more than the rock itself is the boulder field behind it. Skull Rock is the headline, but the real photographs are in the maze of granite that begins ten yards off the trail and goes on for what feels like miles. Slot compositions between leaning boulders. The pale gold of monzogranite against a sky that goes cobalt by seven thirty. A juniper rooted impossibly into a crack. Bring a wide lens for context and something longer for the details. Stay past the moment you think you are done. The light changes quickly out here, and the second photograph is almost always better than the first.

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