I live on the outskirts of Houston. While it’s a great place to be for work and opportunities, the natural scenery isn’t exactly world renown. Until this trip, my landscape photography mostly consisted of my backyard. But as cool as my backyard is, I was itching to see more. No, not more of my backyard of course…more of nature! Our recent family road trip through New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah let us scratch that natural beauty itch. That being said, I’m warning you up front as I’m not 100% certain if it’s contagious or not. In case you suddenly get the urge to hop in your VW van and hit the road, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

First off, this epic adventure was serious business. And I mean serious. Serious as in our trip consisted of 3000+ miles of driving over 10 days containing 2 families and 6 kids between us. I didn’t mention 4 crazy adults but you know that’s a given. And yet, somehow we came out of it alive (and returned with the same number of offspring we left with). Man, this parenting stuff is easy! Anyway, the drive through the mountain states was absolutely gorgeous. In fact, it was so beautiful that we had to constantly resist the urge to pull over and take pictures every 5 minutes. Thankfully our kiddos had to wizz every 5 minutes so we had plenty of excuses to stop and soak it all in. No, no, not the pee; the scenery!

I took all of the landscape photography below with the Fujifilm X-T3. Depending on what I was shooting, I swapped between 2 different lenses: Fujinon XF 18-55mm and the Fujinon 50-200mm. Right before the trip I picked up K&F ND filters for both lenses and experimented out in the wild. These were fantastic investments and I highly recommend picking one up if you can. Several of the shots below are from the drive in between destinations in Utah/Arizona, but we also hit up several key places on our trip. The destinations represented below are from Zion National Park, Checkerboard Mesa, Smithsonian Butte, Horseshoe Bend, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. If you like what you see, you can download these bad boys in full resolution at Pexels or Pixabay.