At 18:30 on a late October day, the setting was quiet.  A few cars went by (“few” being the operative word — a rarity around Zion National Park), as well as a few of the shuttle buses running on time and mostly empty.  For the rest, it was calm and peaceful.  I stood on a bridge and moved back and forth to optimize my composition.  The sky was quite washed out; a neutral density filter could have helped with that, and yet I didn’t care about the sky.  For me, the scene was much more about the last of the sunlight reaching the distant cliffs, the gentle flow of the water in this North Fork of the Virgin River, the tranquil cottonwoods (and the first hints of Fall colors on their leaves), and the soothingly low-contrast lighting along the river.

 

Often, a still image seems to capture a brief moment in time, and gives you quite a different result than taking some video footage of the same scene.  In this case, the scene lingered nearly motionless for several moments; I don’t think a video would have changed much in the rendition.

 

So it was, after a day of driving many miles and experiencing the ostinato of white drum beats to my right, and the constant chord of yellow trumpets on my left.  The absence of patterns and the relaxation of motion in this scene were adagio to my eyes and psyche.