A dominate feature West of Hanksville, Utah, known as Factory Butte offers photographers some exceptional shooting options. This photo was one of the images that I had hoped to take. However, it is a feature that becomes readily noticeable from an elevated shooting angle reveals the beauty of the dramatic depressions, draws, ravines, and spurs that dominates this butte. These are features that motivates when enjoying the drone video that plays on AppleTV devices when in screensaver mode. So of course, this kept my interest active. But my problem as a non-drone photographer was to find an elevated shooting location. This means turning to looking at terrain maps and 3 dimension satellite imagery programs like Google Earth, Google Maps, and AllTrails. When I opened these applications and started looking for promising locations to get an elevated perspective, I soon found this hill with a pinnacle that could potentially offer this desired outcome. I also notice while looking at a 3D perspective a possible interesting leading line, as drawn in the below screen capture from Google Map.
After noticing this, I knew that when I got out there, this was a location that I needed to go to see if my planning was what I envisioned. So upon my arrival to the area and driving along Factory Butte Road I saw the planned train feature, as shown in the below image. It appeared from this on site review that I would get the desired elevation on the terrain feature circled in red. The red X turned out to be the actual shooting point.
Initially, I thought I would hike up the rest of the way to that tall point adjacent to the pinnacle. However, the camera recon drew my attention to erosion ravine that led my eye to the base of the Factory Butte. See the below image and the transparent yellow line overlayed to help show the leading line that attracted my interest. However, I had to some post processing to clean up the ATV and foot tracts that are illustrated under the transparent orange lines highlighting the more dominant tracks.
As for having to remove all tracks in the cryptobiotic soil this initially provided a little tricker than usual. This is because cryptobiotic soil doesn’t have a pattern nor smoothness to copy. So using the typical spot healing, remove tool, healing brush tool, patch tool, content-aware move tool, or the generative fill failed to replicate. I even searched the internet and found a blog with video by Fstoppers titled How To Remove Footprints in Sand Using Photoshop, which is really useful. I would recommend adding to this to anyone’s tool reference library to draw upon when needed. While it was extremely enlightening and I was able to use it a little bit, the editing technique that truly proved useful was to use the Clone Stamp Tool with the settings shown below in the screenshot with mode set to Dissolve, Opacity at 52% and Flow at 65% using a 60 brush and Shape Dynamics active. This cleaned up the footprints and ATV tracks that I edited out.
This photo was shot on a cloudy afternoon with the sun at about the eleven o’clock position and a little on the South side of Factory Butte. I had gotten to the shooting point in the late morning and had been watching the light transition across the sky till it got to the desire position that minimized the amount of shadow. Not only did waiting minimize the shadowing, but it also gave the image a split complementary color theory and a really nicely balanced histogram. Brightness Value was 10.48, which was a 7% gain in brightness with a -0.3 Exposure Value from an Averaging meter mode. I took this picture with the camera set to Aperture priority, because I didn’t want to adjust from the preset f/11 setting. This allowed me to concentrate pushing the color tones found in the butte peak and sky over the more grayish tones in the ground and subdue a segment of the North Caineville Mesa on the left side of the photo.
