July 6, 2020 A Photography Lesson in Badlands National Park

We drove hundreds of miles across open land void of anything except cattle herds and Wall Drug billboards. The scenery made it difficult to imagine that a landscape so severely different could abruptly appear out of the flatness of a grass prairie. But it does, and in the blink of an eye we were in the Badlands of South Dakota.

When I began traveling throughout the country with an RV, I had no illusions that a few days would afford a level of familiarity that could render an image worthy of a place as beautiful as the Badlands. Indeed, the Badlands is a strange place so foreign to me that my naïve wanderings of the rock formations during my first day in the park resulted in feeble attempts to capture the scene.

On my final day I entered Badlands National Park and stopped at an overlook. Minutes before meeting the horizon, the sun painted the cloudy sky with pastel blues and pinks. The unsettled landscape of layered rocks in front of me rose from an interconnected base of wide mounds forming long gentle slopes separated by shadowed crevices. From the slopes of the base, the formations continued upward in a more vertical fashion of carved out serrated edges. Eventually all this culminated into sharp and pointed spires and pinnacles of great number. This action repeated across the wide landscape that appeared to have no end or beginning.

375mm focal length.

The changing light breathes life into these rocks. Once the sun is above the horizon, an abundance of moving clouds cause the sun’s light to paint the rocks selectively. Any change in cloud position relative to the sun’s rays will alter the rock’s appearance dramatically, and rightly the scene takes on an entirely different mood. The shadows become a thing as much as the rocks themselves. Under such conditions, the Badlands is a life form influenced by light. The land of light and stone.

345mm focal length.

345mm focal length.

I attempted to capture wide images with focal lengths of 16 to 24 mm. Unexplainably, it was not working for me. In frustration once again, I put the camera down and simply examined the landscape. The magnificence of this place was moving, and I found it difficult to take it all in because there is so much before you. Why can’t I photograph this place?

495mm focal length.

Then I realized the problem. You can’t see the entire Badlands all at once – like the Grand Canyon, it is beyond our field of vision. And it follows that photographing what you can’t see is even more difficult. Photographers attempt it all the time and do it quite well it seems, but it requires a super wide-angle lens and sometimes several images combined. To that end, aerial images are the crème de la crème.

I had to let go of the unattainable scene. Upon doing that, I began to focus on the qualities that require a more intimate examination. At last, I began to discover pieces of landscape and more intricate details as the light played with the rocks. I attempted to isolate very distant formations or different lighting effects. I put away the wide-angle lens and got out the trusty telephoto lens. My first lesson in the Badlands ended as quickly as it began on this final day.

225mm focal length.

“Where to next?” she asked.