Photographer Captures Spectacular Floral Display in the Middle of Parched Wasteland
When the term decisive moment gets thrown around, it’s usually used to describe a photographic moment that is fleeting — the kind of street photograph that’s there one instant and gone the next.
But the moments captured in these stunning landscape images by photographer Guy Tal are also decisive, not for their fleeting nature, but their rarity.
The landscapes you see here, so colorful with their luxurious coats of Scorpionweed and Beeplant flowers, very rarely look like this. They are the ‘Badlands,’ and Tal describes them as “arid places of clay and shale [that] are the backdrop to harsh, desolate, and infinitely delicate vignettes.” But if you’re patient, very patient, beauty will make itself known even here.
As Tal writes in the description to his series The Good Badlands:
To a casual visitor, it is a sun-baked wasteland of lifeless grey earth, caked and cracked and carved by rare floods. To the patient observer, however, there is great beauty here, delicate and subtle, but it does not reveal itself easily. You have to want to see it, and be willing to work hard for it.
On rare years, wildflowers burst into stunning display of color, transforming the desert into a veritable garden for just few precious days; miss it and you may never get another chance.
Fortunately, Tal is one of those patient observers, and he is allowing us to share his images of this ‘veritable garden’ with you today:
From aerial photographs of flower-speckled wasteland to ground level images that make it seem as if this floral spectacle goes on forever, Tal’s photographs are the result of a great deal of skill, a great deal of patience, and just a touch of good fortune.
To see more of the images in The Good Badlands series, or if you’d like to browse through the rest of his impressive portfolio, head over to Tal’s website by clicking here, or follow him through Facebook and/or Twitter.
(via Colossal)
Image credits: Photographs by Guy Tal and used with permission.
