This photo was taken on a road trip from the east coast to the west coast of America back in 2017. There were 12 of us packed into a minibus, most of us experiencing the beautiful landscapes of America for the first time. This particular photo was taken in the Grand Canyon national park in Arizona, an environment like no other I’ve seen on earth. The first evening we arrived there we witnessed an unbelievable sunset with burning bright colors of ember orange and fierce reds. We were so taken back by the experience that we decided to wake up bright and early the next morning to witness a sunrise hopefully as breathtaking as the evening before.
That next morning as we waited by the canyon edge there was charisma in the air, looking out over such a vast piece of land I believe gives humans a sense of the scale of this planet and makes us respect this place we live in. As the sun rose over the valleys in the distance it engulfed the entire canyon in a golden blanket of light, the trees were now shining bright in the early summer sun and you could now see the various different layers in the magnificent rock around.
To take this photo I climbed down into the canyon along a small ridge that had a certain death drop the other side of it, I kept walking around till I was underneath an overhang of the canyon to where I turned around to see the beauty behind me. By that time the sun had risen enough to enlighten the entire surroundings, I found this composition which captured the environment perfectly, it shows the early summers light gleaming onto the dagger cut rockfaces and throughout the untouched golden pine trees.
This image is about how incomparably small humans are compared with this ginormous planet we live on. We’re a mere speck on this huge spinning sphere yet we’re making such a huge negative impact on this beautiful environment we’re living around. This image shows some of the remaining undisturbed beauty that still exists on our planet, somewhere so beautiful that it’s protected from becoming another bustling polluted city filled with lost human civilizations.