In my travels, I have found Utah to possess some of the most captivating landscapes anywhere in the United States. The color variation found in the strata combined with the abundance of photogenic rock formations provides unique opportunities not found elsewhere. Most of this, of course, is observed easily from the ground. However, there are times when an aerial view gives the best (and perhaps only) perspective of the beauty that lies underneath.

I captured this with an aerial drone over some desert badlands. Standing on the surface, the intricacies of the wind & water erosion patterns are barely visible. From above, the scene is complex and filled with textures and interesting shapes. Upon seeing this through my drone's camera, I had a notion I was gazing over the bones of mythical beasts...a graveyard of dragons. Nature can provide some amazing abstracts. 

In all seriousness, there are likely ancient bones under these dunes! We just refer to them as dinosaurs, not dragons. :-)

For those interested in the geeky, technical side of things, this is a panorama made from multiple images stitched together in Photoshop. The ground formations are so large that I could only capture a small portion with each image. I had to position my drone, and then reposition it using a grid-like pattern while taking images in each part of the grid. It was tedious (and challenging due to the strong winds that day), but eventually, I managed to photograph 34 overlapping images covering the region of you see here.

Creating the panorama was easy, as Photoshop worked its magic and automatically combined the multiple images using overlapping features. While it may appear so, I did not color grade the image into 3 different areas. The subtle blue, red & black colors are earth tones that naturally appear here with the yellow being the highest elevation of soil. Simply adjusting the haze and clarity exposed the texture and colors in each layer.