Colorado landscape – Greg Urbano

Stuckey’s Skeleton: Monuments to Velocity and Obsolescence

The photo of an abandoned Stuckey’s along I-76 in Colorado captures the decline of mid-century roadside travel due to economic shifts and infrastructure changes. With documentary clarity, it emphasizes architectural decay and cultural history, inviting viewers to reflect on both nostalgia and contemporary relevance while preserving a forgotten era of American mobility.

Abandoned roadside building with a former gas canopy and boarded storefront, covered in graffiti and surrounded by cracked pavement and weeds under a blue sky. — The abandoned remains of a former Stuckey’s at the Sedgwick exit along I-76 in northeastern Colorado.

In this documentation of a former Stuckey’s roadside station along Interstate 76 near Sedgwick, Colorado, the photographer captures a distinctly American form of ruin—one born not of catastrophe but of bypass, economic shift, and the relentless evolution of travel infrastructure. The image, positioned within Chapter 6 of his Top 100 Journey, reflects a thematic concern with both literal and metaphorical roads ahead, while simultaneously acknowledging what has been left behind.

The composition employs a wide-angle perspective that emphasizes the structure’s geometric severity against an expansive Colorado sky. The canopy’s angular red-and-white striping draws the eye leftward, while the weathered building facade—bearing faded lettering and graffiti-marked columns—anchors the right side of the frame. Between these elements lies cracked asphalt overtaken by scrub grass, a visual testimony to years of abandonment. The photographer positions himself at a slight distance, allowing the full scope of dereliction to register without sensationalizing the decay.

What distinguishes this work from mere urban exploration photography is its restraint. Rather than fetishizing abandonment or deploying dramatic processing techniques, the photographer presents the scene with documentary clarity. The natural light—diffused through wispy clouds—provides even illumination that reveals texture in the deteriorating surfaces without casting the scene into melodrama. A discarded pink couch in the lower right corner serves as an unexpected punctuation mark, a surreal domestic intrusion into commercial space that hints at the site’s reappropriation by transient visitors.

The Stuckey’s chain represents a specific era of American mobility—mid-century road travel when interstate commerce moved at human speeds and roadside stops functioned as destinations rather than mere interruptions. The photographer’s selection of this subject speaks to an interest in cultural archaeology, in preserving evidence of infrastructures that once defined travel experience but now exist as skeletal reminders of obsolete commercial models.

Within the context of Chapter 6’s “ongoing exploration,” this photograph demonstrates an expansion of the photographer’s subject matter beyond controlled studio environments and collaborative performances. Here, he engages with the built environment as found object, approaching landscape and architecture with the same compositional rigor previously applied to portraiture and experimental lighting. The decision to include this image alongside more technically innovative work suggests an artistic practice concerned with breadth as much as depth—a willingness to move between modes of image-making as the subject demands.

The personal dimension—referenced in the accompanying text through memories of hot dogs and pecan log rolls—remains deliberately absent from the photograph itself. This restraint allows the image to function on multiple levels: as architectural document, as cultural commentary, as landscape study. The photographer trusts the visual evidence to carry meaning without editorial intervention, letting viewers project their own relationships to such spaces.

As part of the Top 100 selection, this photograph confirms that the journey ahead need not always involve technical innovation or conceptual complexity. Sometimes it requires simply bearing witness to what time and economics have rendered irrelevant, preserving in two dimensions what three-dimensional space will not sustain much longer. The road ahead, this image suggests, is also paved with remnants of roads already traveled.

Reclamation and Ruin: A Study in Agricultural Melancholy

The photograph of an abandoned farmhouse near Fort Collins, Colorado, embodies themes of impermanence and decay. The image balances architectural elements with natural landscapes, showcasing technical sophistication through HDR processing. By highlighting details of deterioration amidst recent human traces, it transforms rural abandonment into a poignant meditation on time and memory.

Weathered wooden farmhouse with boarded windows and peeling paint standing in tall grass near Fort Collins, Colorado. — An abandoned wooden farmhouse sits in open prairie near Fort Collins, Colorado.

In this haunting documentation of rural abandonment, the photographer captures a weathered farmhouse on the outskirts of Fort Collins, Colorado—a structure caught in the liminal space between human history and nature’s patient reclamation. The image, selected for Chapter 6 of his Top 100 Journey, exemplifies the ongoing evolution in his practice toward subjects that speak to impermanence, transition, and the quiet dignity of forgotten places.

The compositional strategy reveals a mature understanding of architectural photography merged with landscape sensibility. The two-story structure commands the frame while remaining subordinate to the expansive Colorado sky, which fills nearly half the image with dramatic cloud formations. This deliberate balance prevents the photograph from becoming merely documentary, instead elevating it into meditation on time and decay. The golden hour lighting—captured with precision timing—rakes across the weathered clapboard siding, accentuating every crack, peel, and shadow in the wood grain. This textural emphasis transforms deterioration into visual poetry.

His decision to employ HDR processing demonstrates technical sophistication in service of artistic vision rather than mere spectacle. The extended dynamic range allows simultaneous preservation of detail in the sun-bleached siding and the darker recesses of boarded windows and doorways. The processing maintains naturalistic color while enhancing the amber warmth of dying light against cool blue-grey clouds, creating chromatic tension that mirrors the thematic conflict between persistence and decay.

The overgrown prairie grass in the foreground serves multiple functions within the composition. Practically, it provides textural contrast to the geometric severity of the architecture; symbolically, it represents nature’s inexorable advance. The discarded white fabric or tarp in the lower right corner introduces a note of recent human presence, suggesting that abandonment is an ongoing process rather than a completed historical fact. This detail prevents the image from slipping into nostalgic romanticism.

What distinguishes this work within the context of Chapter 6—titled “The Road Ahead: Recent Work & Ongoing Exploration”—is its synthesis of earlier themes with evolving concerns. The photographer has long demonstrated interest in human traces within landscape, but here the investigation deepens. Rather than simply documenting what remains, he engages with the process of vanishing itself. The boarded windows become blind eyes; the peeling paint functions as aging skin; the sagging roofline suggests exhaustion. The structure possesses almost anthropomorphic vulnerability.

The photograph’s origins as a response to the 52frames weekly challenge reveals another dimension of his practice—the ability to transform assignment-based work into personally meaningful investigation. Many photographers struggle to maintain artistic integrity within the constraints of themed prompts, yet he has consistently used such frameworks as catalysts rather than limitations.

The telephone number still visible on the building’s facade—a commercial ghost—adds poignant specificity. It grounds the abstracted themes of abandonment and time in particular lives, particular businesses, particular failures or departures. This detail resists the tendency toward generic commentary on “the death of rural America” and instead insists on the singular reality of this particular farmhouse, this particular field, this particular evening light.

In positioning this image within his ongoing journey, the photographer signals continued commitment to finding profound resonance in overlooked subjects. The road ahead, it seems, leads deliberately toward what others pass by—not from contrarian impulse, but from genuine recognition that beauty and meaning persist even in, perhaps especially in, the discarded and decaying.

Milky Way Interrupted: The Anthropocene Inscribed in Starlight

“Milky Way Interrupted,” a photograph by Greg Urbano, captures a unique blend of three realities—the Milky Way, Colorado mountains, and an aircraft’s light trail. This interplay creates tension between the timeless cosmos and modern human impact, emphasizing how even remote landscapes reflect our influence. The image invites varied interpretations while acknowledging evolving wilderness photography’s complexities.

The Milky Way stretches across a star-filled night sky above silhouetted mountain ridges, with a bright aircraft light trail crossing the stars. — The Milky Way appears above the mountains of Rocky Mountain National Park as an aircraft passes through the night sky near Rainbow Curve.

Among the selections comprising Chapter 3 of Greg Urbano’s Top 100 Journey, “Milky Way Interrupted” stands as perhaps the most conceptually layered work—a photograph that captures not one subject but three distinct temporal and spatial realities coexisting within a single frame. Captured from Rainbow Curve in Rocky Mountain National Park, the image presents the galactic core of the Milky Way, the ancient mountain silhouettes of Colorado’s high country, and a striking diagonal light trail that bisects the celestial display with unmistakable human presence.

The composition’s power lies precisely in this interruption. The aircraft’s light trail—rendered as a warm, golden-orange streak through long exposure—cuts diagonally across the frame, creating a dynamic tension between the timeless and the contemporary. While astrophotography typically seeks to eliminate such intrusions, this photographer has embraced the collision, transforming what might be considered a technical flaw into the photograph’s conceptual strength. The work becomes a document of our current moment, when even the most remote wilderness viewing points cannot escape the signatures of human movement across the planet.

Technical execution reveals careful consideration of the challenges inherent to night sky photography. Shot with a Nikon Z5, the image demonstrates the full-frame sensor’s capability to resolve stellar detail while managing the noise characteristics of extended ISO settings. The photographer has successfully balanced multiple exposure considerations: maintaining star sharpness through appropriate shutter speed selection, capturing the subtle gradations of airglow near the horizon, and rendering the mountainous foreground as legible silhouettes rather than featureless black masses.

The color palette deserves particular attention. The frame transitions from deep indigo and blue-black in the upper reaches, through the dusty rose and purple tones of the galactic core, down to the unexpected warmth of light pollution painting the horizon in amber and gold. This terrestrial glow—emanating from Front Range cities invisible beyond the mountains—creates an almost painterly quality along the lower third of the composition. The photograph thus captures three light sources simultaneously: starlight millions of years old, the reflected sunlight from a pressurized aluminum tube at 35,000 feet, and the collective illumination of human civilization diffused through atmosphere and distance.

Within the context of the Colorado Landscapes & Cityscapes chapter, this work occupies a unique position. It represents the photographer’s willingness to document Colorado not as pristine wilderness separate from human influence, but as a landscape inevitably marked by contemporary life. The image acknowledges that wilderness photography in the 21st century must contend with satellite constellations, flight paths, and light pollution—that the “natural” landscape exists now only in relationship to human infrastructure.

The title’s simple declaration—”Interrupted”—functions with appropriate restraint. It states fact without judgment, allowing viewers to bring their own interpretations to the juxtaposition. Some may read the aircraft trail as intrusion, others as a reminder of our species’ brief moment against cosmic timescales. The photographer wisely resists imposing a singular reading, instead presenting the visual evidence and trusting the inherent complexity of the image to generate meaning. This restraint marks a mature approach to landscape photography’s evolving role in documenting our changing relationship with the natural world.

St. Vrain Waterfall: A Study in Motion and Permanence

The photograph of a small waterfall along St. Vrain Creek embodies the tension between geological permanence and water’s fleeting essence. Using long exposure, it transforms the scene into a contemplative study of motion and stillness. The intimate scale highlights the beauty of overlooked subjects, emphasizing the profound within Colorado’s landscapes.

Long exposure view of a small waterfall flowing through smooth granite boulders along St. Vrain Creek. — A small waterfall flows between granite rocks along St. Vrain Creek in northern Colorado.

Within the third chapter of Greg Urbano’s Top 100 Journey—devoted to Colorado Landscapes & Cityscapes—this long exposure photograph of the St. Vrain presents a meditation on the fundamental tension between geological permanence and hydrological flux. The image captures a modest cascade in Northern Colorado, yet its technical execution elevates what might be considered a commonplace subject into something altogether more contemplative.

The photographer’s decision to employ long exposure proves essential to the work’s success. Water, rendered as gossamer curtains of white and pale green, flows through the frame with an almost supernatural quality. This technique transforms the kinetic energy of rushing water into something visually paradoxical: movement frozen into silken stillness. The effect creates a temporal ambiguity that refuses to commit to either instant or duration, existing instead in a liminal space between photographic modes.

Compositionally, the work demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how natural forms interact within the frame. Pink-hued granite boulders, weathered and moss-touched, provide structural anchors throughout the image. These stones—products of millennia—stand in stark contrast to the ephemeral blur of water that has shaped them. The photographer positions these elements with careful attention to visual weight and balance, allowing the eye to trace pathways through the composition that mirror the water’s own journey through the rocky terrain.

The color palette reveals itself as deliberately restrained. Warm earth tones of pink and tan granite dominate, punctuated by touches of green moss and the cool, milky whites of the flowing water. This chromatic restraint prevents the image from becoming overly dramatic, instead maintaining the documentary authenticity that characterizes much of this chapter’s work. The photographer resists the temptation to over-saturate or manipulate, trusting the natural beauty of the Colorado landscape to speak for itself.

What distinguishes this photograph within the broader context of the Colorado Landscapes & Cityscapes chapter is its intimate scale. Rather than pursuing the grand vistas often associated with Rocky Mountain photography, the work turns its attention to a more modest subject—a small waterfall that countless hikers might pass without particular notice. This choice reflects a maturing sensibility within the photographer’s practice, one that finds profundity in the overlooked rather than the obvious.

The technical execution warrants recognition as well. Managing long exposure in daylight conditions requires careful control of light through neutral density filtration and precise shutter speed calculation. The photographer has balanced these elements skillfully, maintaining detail in both the highlighted water and shadowed crevices of stone. Branches visible at the top of the frame remain relatively sharp, suggesting a shutter speed calibrated to render water motion without sacrificing all structural definition in the surrounding environment.

Within the arc of the Top 100 Journey project, this image represents an important moment of focus. The work demonstrates that landscape photography need not rely on sweeping panoramas or dramatic weather to achieve visual and emotional resonance. Instead, it proposes that careful attention to the quotidian—to the small waterfalls tucked into Northern Colorado’s piedmont—can yield images of equal contemplative depth. The St. Vrain Waterfall stands as evidence of a photographer learning to see not just the spectacular, but the quietly profound.