Echo Canyon
Zion National Park, Utah, USA.

Fallen
Glen Orchy, Highlands, Scotland.

Leaf
Scotland. I found this autumnal oak leaf half embedded and preserved into the ice of a frozen pool. The sun was sinking and lighting the leaf with a warm orange glow, while the ice reflected the clear blue sky above, giving rise to the contrasting warm and cool colours.

Frosted
Rannoch Moor, Highlands, Scotland. Amazing details can be found at your feet. Where they poked above their icy home, these dead grasses were encased in frozen shards.

Erratic
Isle of Arran, Scotland. An erratic boulder on a bed of coastal sandstone. Sunrise light enhances the natural colours.

Virgin Grasses
Zion National Park, Utah, USA. These grasses are intricately thin, like spider's webs, and only seem to grow close to the banks of the Virgin River. In the morning sunlight they looked incredible. I wanted to make an image of them and these seed pods gave me something on which to hang the image.

Half
Garvie Beach, Scotland. Lying on the tussocks above the beach were these little dead ferns, and such was the low angle of the sun the previous night's frost clung to the shaded side. When I passed by an hour later, all the ice was gone.

Skull
Rannoch Moor, Scotland. Beauty in death; the subtle tones of colour on this deer skull matched the lichen of the rock.

Canyon Paradise
Lower Emerald Pools, Zion NP, Utah, USA.

Last Rays in Zion
Zion National Park, Utah, USA. From the park entrance the quiet Pa'rus Trail follows the Virgin River winding up into the narrowing canyon. For a few evenings I walked this path and observed the movement of the 'terminator' where the sun's final rays of light reached across the landscape before it disappeared behind the canyon walls every night. One evening I saw this big clump of yellow grass softly lit above the shaded ground; I had just enough time to set up on the tripod, focus the tilt-shift lens and make this image before the delicate light was gone.

Feather
Wester Ross, Scotland. Frozen moorland pools at Druim Bad a' Ghaill provided me with an hour and a half's entertainment finding a way to effectively compose the striking curves encased in the ice.

Cling
Strangles, Cornwall, England. There is something so admirable about this tiny fledgling plant, clinging to its crack in the cliff wall.

Glide
Ashdown Forest, Sussex, England.

Glow
Hesworth Common, West Sussex, England. Returning to this fern a few months after I photographed it green and full of life, surrounded by the colourful bloom of August heather (see 'Light' gallery), its posture had rather changed: stiff, brittle and lifeless. But it retained every bit of beauty. The winter sun bathed the place in a rich glow.

Devil's Shelter
Devil's Garden, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah, USA. Most photographer visitors to Devil's Garden concentrate on the imposing sandstone hoodoos as their main subjects but in the soft light after sunset I was drawn to the subtle blue and yellow colours of the vegetation growing in the sand surrounding these petrified sand formations and so I wanted them to be the focus of the image. I tried to include enough of the sandstone arch and boulder to give a sense of the strange environment which shelters these plants.

Maple Syrup
Zion National Park, Utah, USA.

Ebony Pebbles
Rackwick Beach, Hoy, Orkney Isles. These ebony pebbles buried in the sand caused the receding tide to carve gentle channels around them as it went.

Mopane Litter
Damaraland, Namibia.

Acacia Erioloba
Deadvlei, Namibia. Bark study of a Camel Thorn tree.