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I changed the settings for comments so that you do not need to register to leave a comment.  I hope this fixes the issue as I heard there was disappointment that comments were not readily available.

There is still one more posting to come.  I hope to be able to finish up this weekend.

Sunrise Silhouette of the Mittens

This is a simple photo of a sunrise with the Mittens in silhouette.  This is in Monument Valley in Arizona.  We were lucky to have clouds to give some texture to the sky.

Spider Rock, Home of the Spider Woman

Canyon de Chelley

 

 

 

This was our first stop in Canyon de Chelley - the famous Spider Rock.  Naturally, there is a Navajo legend regarding this unusual rock spire.  Here is someone's description that I found on the internet.  The "Dine" noted are the ancient Indians inhabiting this area prior to the arrival of the Navajo.

"Spider Rock is the home of Spider Woman and here is how that came to be. When the Dine came into this fourth world from the previous third world, monsters were here and killed many people. Spider Woman used her supernatural powers to send Monster-Slayer and Child-Born-Of-Water in a search for their father, Sun-God, who showed them how to destroy the monsters. Monster-Slayer also has a role in the story of Tse'Bit'Ai, which means "rock with wings." The Anglo word is Shiprock.
Spider Woman is now highly honored as a deity among the Dine, and she chose the top of Spider Rock as her home.  She has two important roles in the Navajo stories; one as the teacher of weaving. Her husband, Spider Man, made the first loom, using sky and earth cords for the cross poles, sun rays for the warp sticks, rock crystal and sheet lightning for the heralds, and a sun halo for the batten. The comb was made of a white shell.  Spider woman's other function in Dine society is to enforce obedience in children. They are told that if they do not behave Spider Woman will carry them away to be eaten. The top of Spider Rock is supposed to be white because of the bones of children." [ausbcomp.com]

The outcrop may be 230 million years old and is made of various layers of sandstone.  Its height is over 800 feet.  Apparantly it has been climbed.  A story told by Jack Graham is that a couple of people climbed it not too many years ago.  They were thrown out of the Park by the authorities, and during their drive away they were involved in a car accident and died.  Hearing that, we all decided the top of this rock was not an ideal photo op location.

Strange Hole in the Rock

Monument Valley Area - Click to Enlarge

Was it a laser beam from space?  Was it some strange ice age drain?  Was it some very soft rock that was encased in stronger stone when the surrounding sandstone was laid down millions of years ago?  No one knew a reason why this hole would exist - it just does.  Strange but interesting.  By the way, this area was not subject to the ice age.

Canyon de Chelley Panographic




Canyon de Chelley - Click to Enlarge

Here is another panographic photo.  This one was made with 14 individual photos stitched together in Photoshop.  There are enough pixels in this photo to create a print 86 inches wide by 18 inches high.

The image itself was clearly shot at the bottom of the canyon.  Just before we ate lunch, we stopped near the house and Jack asked Oscar if we could get permission to shoot some ruins and rock paintings.  Oscar knows the family and said he would get out and see what he could do to gain access.  I got the general impression the deal needed to be done by people who knew each other and that there was a financial component.  The good news is that we got access.  We had to walk the perimeter of the field to get to the location to shoot the ruin.  We shot the ruin for a while, and when we finished with that, I turned around and surveyed the view, looking back to where we came from.  Impressive.  So I thought about how would I capture the impressive view.  A single photo could capture only a portion of the view.  Even using a wide angle lens would not capture enough of the view to capture the impact, especially since the wider the lens, the more the background gets pushed into the distance.  The answer seemed to be a pano.  So I turned the camera to its portrait position and took enough photos to cover about 220 degrees of view.  When I look at this photo, I do not get the impression that the actual view is so wide.  When the image is flat on the screen, there are no cues that the image follows a huge arc.

The ruins, by the way, are behind me - in the missing 145 degrees of view.

In past years I would have tried to capture the top of the centre canyon outcrop.  I think if I did that the scale of the centre band of trees would be too small and the house would be lost.  I think that the subject would change to the then fully visible centre outcrop - look at the two approx. 45 degree lines leading towards the apex of the centre outcrop - that's where your eye would go.  I wanted this photo to give a grand sense of the natural location in relation to the habitation of man, so the small house centre stage needs to be the focus.

Ruins, Canyon de Chelley - Click to Enlarge

This is the photo of the ruins and rock painting.  Some of the painting is within the last 100 years, while other images are hundreds of years old.  You can see that there has been a restoration - a new window with glass, a door, and some form of recent roof.  We had no details of how it is used today or what is it's history.

This is not a good photo as we were shooting mid day and the foreground is in full sunlight, and the subject is in full shadow - way too much contrast so the ruin gets lost. So not only is it a photo of a ruin, it's a ruin of a photo.

More Posts to Come!

Even though I've been back from my trip for over a week, I have 5 more posts that I want to write.  It may take about 2 or 3 weeks to finish them all because there are a lot of things demanding my attention ahead of all the blogging.  Stay tuned for more!

Goosenecks State Park, Utah

Goosenecks State Park is a short drive north and east of Monument Valley up Highway 163. 

It's hard to tell from the photo, but the San Juan River is 1,000 feet below the canyon rim.  That's a long way down.  It's similar to the height of the lower observation deck of the CN Tower in Toronto.  We saw no one stepping beyond the protective walls to get a better photograph.  It is tempting to do so since this photo was taken with one leg of my tripod on top of the protective stone wall in order to reduce the cut off on the bottom of the photo.  It would have been nice capture the entire loop of the river.  Oh well!

This photo is actually a panorama of 5 photos that I stitched together in Photoshop.  The angle of view of the stitched file is maybe about 120 degrees horizontally.  The original file is 568MB of data - a very large file filled with all kinds of fine detail. I was able to capture this much detail because I used my Pentax 645D medium format camera that produces 40MB files for each photo.  That file is way too large to load onto the Blogger site, so I reduced it to 154KBs.  This means that 99.9% of the data has been thrown away.  The original photo I'm looking at on my computer screen is much richer looking because the fine detail is more visible.  On my screen the photo is 22" x 10".  Some math inclined people may ask how 5 files at 40MB each becomes 568MBs when stitched, especially considering the photos overlap by about 30%?  I have no idea and there are no controls in Photoshop to control the size of the pano stitch-up.

This photo is a blow-up of the top end of the right river leg.  It shows the finer grain of detail in the larger pano shot.  There are pixels in this shot that have been eliminated in the pano shot above.

Outside of all this photo talk, the view of the San Juan River is incredible when standing at the rim and looking out.  The photos do not convey the true majesty of standing there and seeing it with your own eyes!