Flatirons Vista

Author's Comments

The Flatirons are everywhere in Boulder. You see them from the grocery store parking lot, from the highway, from the kitchen window of any rental on the west side of town. That ubiquity is the problem and the opportunity. The photograph everyone makes is from Chautauqua Meadow at sunrise, the slabs going pink against a clean sky, and it is a real photograph. It is also one that has been made ten thousand times. I have started going to NCAR instead. The angle is different, more oblique, and the foothills crumple in the foreground in a way that gives the formations their actual scale. From Chautauqua the Flatirons feel like a backdrop. From the south they feel like geology, like something that happened slowly and is still happening. Winter is underrated here. A dusting of snow on the slabs in late January, the grasses gone tan, the light thin and lateral - that is when the rock reads most honestly. Summer is greener and prettier and somehow less interesting. The slabs want contrast. They want a sky that is doing something. Golden hour is the obvious answer and the right one, but the five minutes before sunrise are better than the five minutes after. The eastern face catches first light directly, and for a brief window the rock glows from within rather than from above. You have to be in position before you think you need to be. Bring a longer lens than the wide one your instinct reaches for. Compress the layers. Let the foothills do their work.

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