Every nature photographer has a place near their home where they enjoy going to get away from the everyday stresses of life - a place where they can reconnect with nature and capture on film some of her astonishing yet fleeting beauty. For me this area is known as the Superstition Wilderness. Located within a twenty-minute drive of my home in Mesa, this large and varied wilderness offers me welcomed respite from the extreme urban sprawl of the Phoenix Metro Area. I am not and never have been a "big city person", and therefore living in such a place is a rather unnatural choice for me. This is why I have chosen this desert oasis as my own means of escape - a place where I can be free to think and truly be who I am.

Often when I travel into the Superstitions I do so with no photographic agenda in mind. Weather in this mountain range is extremely unpredictable and the area is best approached openly. On this particular day the sky was crystal clear with no storms in sight. My approach was to simply drive until something struck me. My dilemma was that sunset was near and every moment spent in the car was another moment of precious light lost. With that I decided to stop the car and begin a foot exploration. The sun was dropping fast when finally I saw it - the perfect subject!

It was two agave plants rooted on the side of a hill. Their only company was one another in an otherwise barren landscape. It was this feeling of unity in a harsh environment that I wanted to capture on film. My approach was simple. I would wait until after sunset when the afterglow was perfectly colored, then use fill-flash to light the agaves.

This process involves preparedness, patience, and an eye for timing. After sunset intense colors often appear, but generally these colors begin to fade within minutes. It is the job of the photographer to recognize and be ready for that peak. This means the intended image needs to be set up before those colors appear in order to capture the optimum moment. In this instance I waited approximately thirty minutes after the sun disappeared behind the horizon to take the shot. I wanted to wait for the blues in the top layers of the sky to change to deep shades of indigo. With the colors now perfect and the frame set, it was now time to take the photograph.

With my in-camera meter set on spot, I took a reading from the colored area just above the horizon (in between the golds and blues). I did this to ensure the sky would retain its color in the final image. If your camera does not have a spot meter, fill the frame with the sky to obtain your reading then recompose the original image and use the locked in reading. Next, I took my reading (4 seconds @ f 11) and dialed it into my flash. It is important to make sure this reading falls within the distance scale prescribed by the flash - if it doesn't simply adjust the readings accordingly. Finally, in order to tweak my flash exposure I closed my aperture 1/2 stop to f 11.5 (the aperture controls the flash while the shutter controls the ambient or available light). By doing this I toned down the brightness of the flashed subject while retaining the original background exposure. With the flash attached to a sync cord I hand held it above my camera and fired the shot. I was pleased with the resulting image and felt that I had portrayed on film, to the best of my abilities, the feelings that originally drew me towards those two lonely agaves on the side of a hill in the Superstition Wilderness.