Our last full day of the tour turned out to be a long one. We got up early and headed to Professor Valley, the location used by the TV series Westworld. There were classic western monoliths in the distance, and the landscape provided lots of trees and brush and patterned mud. This provided a lot of picturesque backdrops for shooting as well as a variety of natural environments.
I started the shoot by working with Kate Snig, who is great at finding interesting backgrounds to shoot against, and does amazing poses. As we moved further along the trail, I switched off shooting the various models, and we finally ended up working around a big rock monolith with all four of the models. I think everyone sensed we were getting the the end of the tour and tried to take as much advantage of what we had available. The models even did some fun shots posing with cameras and appearing to take pictures of each other.
After finishing the shoot, we returned to Moab and checked out of the hotel. After that, we ordered take out for dinner from the restaurant we’d had lunch at the previous day, then we had lunch at a food truck famous for their Quesadillas, allegedly the best restaurant in Moab. It was good, but not being an expert on Quesadillas I’m not sure how I’d rate it. After lunch we began to head back towards Salt Lake City, with one planned shoot midway in 9 Mile Canyon.
Our navigation got a miscue so we ended up taking a bit of a long detour, finally ending up correctly in 9 mile canyon. Driving along it, I wasn’t quite sure how good the shooting location would be, but we finally ended up at a little stop right near the road that had some cool ancient petroglyphs along a wall, with some beautiful green growth on the land is surrounded. It had rained a little before we got there, so the clouds provided some good light for portraits and some dramatic skies. I was able to get some interesting shots which was a bit of a surprise after a long drive without high expectations of something interesting.
We quickly chowed down on our dinner, some eating in the van, as we were a bit late and were making our way back to Salt Lake City. We got back to the hotel we had started with near midnight with a fairly early call for our last shoot of the tour.