Chimney Rock

In July my wife and I took our kids on a 2000-mile road trip out west, spread out over the course of ten days. We had been planning the trip for several months, and it was such a fun and rewarding experience to visit the Black Hills, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, and many other locations that none of us had ever seen before. Including, in a bit of an ironic twist for me, the storied western Nebraska landmark Chimney Rock. We both grew up in Lincoln, hundreds of miles to the east, and while this ancient rock formation near the Oregon Trail isn’t exactly a pilgrimage for people where we come from, it’s also not uncommon for folks to have visited it. My brother and my wife even took a bus trip out west in elementary school, along with most of their class, in order to see this and other historical landmarks from the pioneers’ journeys across the continent.

That’s all to provide a bit of context, as you know I’m fond of doing, about this particular image. Though the landmark has shrunk over the years as weather and erosion take their eons-long toll, it still stands proud on the prairie, towering in the distance much as it once did. The question, then, especially as it relates to photography, was how to capture the majesty, or even the essence, of Chimney Rock with naught but a Fuji X100F? The answer, or at least an answer, lies in the image you see today. And while I’m not sure how successful I was at doing what I set out to do, it was a fun and, for me, unique experience that I will likely remember for a very very long time.

Exposure settings weren’t really that much of an issue here. I shot at a relatively pedestrian f/11, 1/450 second, ISO 200. Nothing special at all, and pretty standard for this kind of landscape shot. Instead, it was the compositional choices I made that had a far greater impact. I put the limestone landmark on the left side of the frame, roughly aligning with the classic rule of thirds, which meant the right side was occupied by the sweeping hills that are so common on the Nebraska prairie. The clouds in the sky really did me a solid here, as a wide-open empty blue sky doesn’t always convey a sense of scale–which is pretty important in a shot like this. I also moved myself off the dirt road on which we were standing so as to get the fence in the foreground out of the shot entirely.

And that’s one interesting thing about visiting a spot like this: what you don’t see is often just as essential as what you do. For instance, in addition to a very artificial fence in front, what filled the field directly behind me was dozens of cows. That’s right, all the majesty of Chimney Rock is just a backdrop for a pretty normal Nebraska farm. Many of the cows even came over to say Hello (or, rather, “moo”) to me and my family as we stood around looking at that giant rock in the distance. It was a fun, and to be honest, humbling way to contextualize this image that often evokes images of endless fields and western adventures.