At the beginning of December, I had just come back from a great trip home to London over Thanksgiving and was planning on getting settled back in Boston for the run into Christmas. I had been back a week when I met up with Nikki, awesome lead photographer over at Nicole Chan Photography and her other half Jason Loeb to celebrate his birthday at Sweet Cheeks in Fenway (which if you haven’t been to, you need to ASAP!!).

I love hanging around with these guys for lots of reasons, with just one of them being their spontaneity. I’m always one for a last minute, unplanned trip and I feel hanging around with these guys always has the potential for something of this nature. Well, sitting there opposite Jason, the conversation (aided by a beer and maybe a whiskey) quickly turned to a trip out West within the next week. Having never been out there and it being on my list of places to absolutely get to, I didn’t take much convincing. With Jason being an avid landscape photographer himself and shooting panoramas on a Linhof 617s, that was it, trip on!! My lovely wife Erin wasn’t going to miss out on a trip like this either, and after a little convincing from her sister, she was booked on the flight with us.

We flew just over a week later into Las Vegas and after a quick trip into town for a gelato hit and a look in the Peter Lik gallery for inspiration, we hit the road en route to Zion National Park and Zion Ponderosa Ranch where we were staying……….where we were the only ones staying!  Winter in this part of Utah doesn’t pull too many tourists, but with scenery like that, any time of year makes it great to visit for landscape photography and I might even add better for it without the crowds of people around.

Arriving late at night meant that we hadn’t had the chance to scout out a location for a sunrise shoot the very next morning, but we had done a little pre-trip research. We decided that a visit to Grafton, a well known ghost town and location to some of the scenes in the film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” might be a good place to start our shoot for the day. With just two sunrises and two sunsets to shoot, we really had to make the most of it and I think that for the time we had, we did just that.

Despite the light not being as perfect during the day as you get during the “golden hour” in the morning and evening, we continued exploring some of the rest of the park and getting more images in. It’s hard not to stop every five minutes to get the cameras out again, and we covered lots of the areas that were accessible to us. We also had the chance to view some of the local wildlife, seeing plenty of mule deer, long horn sheep, ringtail cats and even spotting some mountain lion tracks! With some of the hikes and paths being closed due to snow and ice conditions we were still able to bag a good selection of images and get some ideas for when we get the chance to head back there again, hopefully in the not too distant future!

Thank you so much to Jason and Nikki for making this trip possible and please stop back here to check for more links to the photos that they got from this trip once they have them online as well. To check out Jason’s panoramic images from Zion click here. Also you might want to check out some photos of another one of our traveling companions, Trev, who populated my Erin’s instagram feed after stowing away in a delivery from photojojo just a day or so before we left.

All the best and have a great start to 2014!

Roberto