“Sun Dial” was made by Steve Kozak, the incoming Executive Director of TPPA. “I was doing a workshop in July in the cool mountain air of Ouray, Colorado, when I realized that I was only a few hours from Arches National Park, so I decided to check it out.”
Steve left the mountain temperature of the low 70’s and arrived in Arches to a warm 109 degrees. “When I arrived, I was already hot and grumpy and decided there was nothing new I could do that had not been done a million times before. No photographer in his right mind would be shooting at that time of day. So I started walking back to the car without taking a single image.”
But something changed his mind and Steve decided to give it one more look. “So I turned around and started looking at the shadow side and, when I saw the dead tree at the base of the arch, I knew I was on to something,” he explains.
“I laid down and got as low as I could to position the tree and the sun within the arch and waited for people to get out of the way,” he adds. The image was exposed at f22 at 1000 sec. at ISO 100.
“Sun Dial” won the Lexjet Sunset Award at Summerfest ‘15.
