Comments ....

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!

Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona

This is a big dam and it created the very large Lake Powell behind it.  A number of things occur with a big dam like this.  Lots of electricity is produced, water flow is controlled downstream (part of the Colorado River Storage Project - a US mega project), and a tourist industry is created for recreational boating on Lake Powell (very scenic).  The dam looks similar to the Hover Dam which was built for similar reasons. 

The photo above shows a very large relief map of the area.  You can see the dam in the canyon in the lower right area of the photo.  All the blue in the middle area of the map is Lake Powell.  Notice all the vertical cliffs around the Lake - apparently the scenery is spectacular.  This photo was taken inside the visitor centre.

This is the beginning of Lake Powell just upstream of the dam.

I dropped into the local marina just outside of Page.  You can rent a 75 foot house boat that looked to be about 3,000 square feet of space for $8,000 a week.  If you can cope with a 50 foot boat, the price is half that.  Hmmm . . . . let me talk to Cathy . . .  Their storage yard must have had about 200 boats of various sizes.

3 Degrees of Connection to Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams is one of the most famous photographers of all time.  He created monumental type photographs by using clear subjects and a full spectrum of contrasting black and white light.  This gentleman I met in the visitor centre at Canyon de Chelley Park.  He was selling some very nice silver jewelry he made.  After talking to him for a while, he commented on my camera and asked if I had heard of Ansel Adams.  Well, there was a leading question.  He then pulled out a book of Adams photos and described how he had found or was given this old book, and as he was turning the pages, much to his surprise, he was looking at a photo of his mother and sister.  He then pulled out about four other books and showed the same photos as were in the first book.  This was quite a surprise for us as well - very enjoyable.  The cynics would say this was great marketing - making a connection to an obvious landscape photographer.  The optimists would say this was wonderful chance connection over an area of mutual interest.  I'm quite sure this is the first time I have met a person with a clear connection to Ansel Adams.

A Workshop Completed

The photo above shows Joe and Dick on the left, participants, Jack centre right, the workshop leader, and Oscar our Indian guide.  This is not a good photo, but it will have to do as a photo journalistic type record of the group in action at Oscar's property in the Canyon de Chelley.  Gord, another participant is off to the right photographing, and I'm up an incline taking the shot of the pictographs shown three posts ago.

So why go to a workshop?  My objective was to have exposure to a professional photographer so that I could improve my ability to conceptualize a photograph before I setup the camera, to compose a better photo, to process photo's more successfully, and to find out what other people with a similar interest in photography are all about.  Add to this an interest in being in an location with lots of 'post card' shot opportunities.  It's great to start the photo process with strong photo ops - it aids the learning process.  In general, all my objectives were met in one way or another, and I think I left Arizona and Utah a better photographer.  I think the real gain for me is the envisioning of what I want from the photograph before I take it.  This is really big, and I can see this in the photos of pro photographers I look at.  A great photo is rarely accidental.

The other gain was greater insight into the power and speed of software like that from Nik Software.  Wow, it is amazing and speedy.

Perhaps one of the most unexpected benefits of this workshop was having time to take a picture.  Usually time is the enemy as people are waiting on me to finish so other things can happen.  Not on the workshop - time is lavishly available and modest investments with it yield rich rewards.  This is indeed a Nirvana.

So, I have many things to work on.  I need to practice photo conceptualization and composition.  More software familiarization and skill building is critical.  Some changes in my photo assets would be helpful - a tripod upgrade, an upgrade to the next level of neutral density filters, new panoramic stitching software, and the fill-in of a couple of missing lenses from my camera systems - both my Nikon and Pentax systems.  Other than that, my existing equipment and software worked well.

Someone said to me that once I take my first photo workshop I'll be taking them every year.  Well, that may be so!

Indian Ruins - Canyon de Chelley

The nature of the geology of the sandstone canyon walls provides many recesses above the canyon floor where lodging can be established.  The basic construction was explained as stone blocks held together with some type of mud mortar.  The stones were tooled to some extent to aid in orderly wall building.  Some buildings, but not where we were, were built to five levels.  This settlement is different from the others we saw as ruins are both on the wall and floor of the canyon.  New fencing in front of the ruins was introduced last year.  The fence is so tall that it is very difficult to set-up a tripod and not have the fence in the shot.  Another site in the canyon could not be photographed because of the height of the new fence.

Pictographs range from ancient to relatively modern.

A tree with leaves budding out.  I believe this is a Cottonwood tree.  Apparently it and Russian Olive trees were introduced in the 1930s when the rivers through the canyon were dammed to create reservoirs for flow control.  The Russian Olive is considered a weed and is being removed from the canyons.  They a cut in the summer and burned in the winter.  Oscar our guide remembered when there were no trees and the canyon floor was sand.

My Copy of Someone Else's Famous Photo

We had look-outs to ensure we were not hit by traffic of Highway 163 north and a bit east of Monument Valley.  We all had tripods and cameras - this takes extra time to take a photo.  This photo was taken on the way back from the Gooseneck Park (a future post will show those photos) looking towards Monument Valley.  Kind of a cool effect.

More Photos from Monument Valley

The two photos above are from a canyon near Monument Valley.  The photo on the left shows the canyon wall and a natural 'cave' a quarter the way up the face on the center left.  Into this shallow cave the ancient Anasazi Indians built a home.  The close-up is the photo on the right.  Ruins such as these are generally inaccessible by their very nature, and where accessibility is possible, they are protected by fences.

The next two photos are of the Mittens looking out from the parking lot of the Navajo Centre and Hotel.  The images were taken as the sun set approached behind us.  They are different photos than the one posted in the blog of April 20th, but they are all from the same photo event.  The two below have been processed on my home computer with Lightroom and Nik software.  I can do a better processing job a home compared to my 13 inch Mac Book Pro on the road. 

The colour of the sandstone changed as the level of light fell and the red of the sunset became stronger.  Although it doesn't look like it, the exposure on the lower picture is 50 time longer than the upper picture.  It was very noticeably darker when the lower photo was taken.  The camera adjusts for this on average by taking a longer exposure.  The lighting effects are quite different between the photos.  Which do you like better?

Canyon De Chelley and Oscar our Navajo Guide

When touring away from the paved roads in the Navajo Nation, a non-Indian requires an Indian guide.  The benefit of the guide besides knowing how to get to where you want to go, is that the guide provides a vehicle capable of traversing the often quite rough terrain, and they explain the background or history of the area.  Our guide for this day was a gentleman named Oscar.  Oscar is a large, middle aged man who runs a guide company of five, and is also a Shaman.  He grew up in the canyon.  The photo above is the home he grew up in with his brothers and sisters.  Every school day he would climb out of the canyon along a trail not far from the house, and catch a school bus.  As you can see, there is no electricity, running water, and no washroom facilities.

Just around the corner from the house is a large recess in the wall of the canyon where ancient Indians painted the rock.  The photo above is the best remaining example of this art at this location.  You can see that the pictographs continue along the wall in the lower part of the photo.

 

 

 

I was looking from Oscar's old home across the canyon floor and noticed this very flat vertical face of rock on the opposite wall of the canyon.  I asked Oscar if that face had been like that for as long as he could remember.  His answer was surprising.  No he said.  One day when he still lived here his brother came home and said that the rocks on the opposite side of the canyon were going to fall today.  The family gathered some chairs and sat to watch the wall.  In time, a cracking sound was heard, and part of the canyon wall started to separate.  Immediately there was an avalanche of rock and dust filled the entire canyon.  As the dust settled, the rock slide had fallen to half way across the canyon floor, and up on the wall was the smooth, vertical surface seen today, and captured on the left side of the photograph above. I asked him how his brother knew that the rocks would fall imminently.  He did not answer.

 

I really have tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up in that home.  To me, that life shows the resiliency of the human condition and pays witness to the huge range of environments that we can live in.  Quite astonishing that here is a man who started his life in a similar environment to his ancestors, and now in middle age is much closer to us.  That's a lot of change.

 

I enquired about being a Shaman.  Oscar explained that his was a spiritual roll, and that he healed people through the spirits.  A medicine man will use native medicines to heal.  Asked if the patient need to believe in the healing spirits, Oscar gave me a surprised look and said yes.  Then he went on to say that the white man came to Navajo country with their black book and spoke of their God.  And the Navajo accepted that the white men spoke the truth.  But that it was their truth, for them.  The Navajo truth is in their tradition.  But did I know that my God was also their God.  What a wonderful conversation.



Antelope Slot Canyon Outside Page Arizona

Tuesday April 23rd

Slot canyons are amazing.  There are two very famous and very extensively photographed slot canyons outside of Page.  I toured the lower canyon and did not have enough time to also see the upper canyon. A slot canyon is is a deeply incized crack in the sandstone rock cut by high velocity, intermittent water runoff.  The space between the walls is anywhere between 5 and 10 feet, with a depth generally of 20 to 30 feet - purely a guess.  Light therefore is dim, and bounces between the various water sculpted faces of the stone.  This is a photographer's delight.  It's all about the light.

The canyons are run by the Navajo as a paid tourist attraction.  Luckily there are two types of admission - a general tour which is guided, and a photographers which is not guided.  Both are the same price, but I had 2 hours and 10 minutes to wander slowly through the slot canyon looking for photo oportunities.  The general tour is likely through in about 30 minutes.  It was quite wonderful.  Sometimes I was all alone for up to 10 of 15 minutes.  Then a general tour would pass through, and again I would be alone.  They have monitors who walk the canyon making sure there are no straglers and that a photographer's photo pass had not expired.  The interesting method used to limit the number of people on a photo pass is that you have to have a digital SLR camera and a tripod to qualify.  It works.  There were a good number of serious photographers with serious equipment.

I really could have used another hour to reverse my way through the canyon.  Until you go through it once, you really don't know where the photo ops are, and which are likely going to yield the best results.  Plus, you really need to stop, look around, and think, think, think about what to shoot and how to do it.  Patience is critical - that's why two hours goes by so quickly.

Thanks to Jack Graham for prepping me for this side trip.  The official paid workshop ended yesterday.  He showed me a blog he produced on his blog site to assist people to be prepared for photographing the slot canyon, plus some personal pointers. Jack is a very generous guy.

It took three hours to drive back north and west to Page, and another 5 hours to drive south to Phoenix. I left Page about 1:15, made one stop south of Flagstaff at, yes, Strabucks, and ended up in Phoenix at the hotel around 7 pm.

The day today is Wednesday and I am just about ready to leave the hotel, return my car, and shuttle to the airport.  It's been an incredible trip, but I am looking forward to returning to Cathy and the family.  Hugs all around!!!

Another View of Monument Valley

This is an image taken from the same location as my previous post, but oriented at a different angle and catching the near horizontal sun rays just after sunrise.  Jack Graham did all the post camera processing on this image as part of our Lightroom, NIK, and Photoshop software training.  I think Jack did a very good job.  It has been interesting and enjoyable to be exposed to Jack's thinking on how to use the incredible array of software tools at our fingertips in order to bring out the best in an image.  I hope you enjoy this photo.

Monument Valley, Utah - Arizona border

These are called the Mittens.  We've probably all seen them in adds and movies dozens of times.  These are definitely a tourist mecca with supporting motels, campgrounds and restaurants.  These are just a very short distance south of the Utah - Arizona border, in Arizona.  They are buttes made of three, layered stone formations, the most expansive being the vertical mid zone made of sandstone.  The Plateau is somewhere between 5,000 to 6,000 feet above sea level, and the tallest butte rises something like 1,000 feet above the plateau floor.  This plateau is a high elevation desert.

We were staying in a rented house which is part of the largest tourist accommodation complex in the area called Goulding's Lodge.  These landforms are within the very expansive Navajo Nation reservation.

This photo was taken near dusk.

Weather has been very sunny during the day, temperatures in the high 60s during the day, and down to freezing at night.  It is very dry here - with no exertion you can become dehydrated quickly.  We are always carrying water.

It's about the Journey ...

Well, sorry I haven't blogged. Things did not go as planned.  I would like to preface what I am going to say by saying I'm ok - really.  What happened allowed me to experience the fine training and wonderful people who make up Phoenix's paramedics, ambulance, fire, and emergency hospital services. The situation that developed was that I became air sick during the flight and this developed into some type of panic attack.  By the time we landed I was very sick and not stable on my feet.  Air Canada called the paramedics and they suggested that I needed to go to the emergency department.  The staff at St. Luke's Medical Center were terrific.  The attending doctor was concerned that I may have had a heart attack and assigned a stress test for the next morning.  My enzyme blood work, tread mill stress test, and nuclear imaging all showed that no heart attack occurred, and that my heart is in very good shape - a hard way to get a confidence boost.  So I'm good, and they gave me a pill to take if the flight is turbulent on my flight home.  All's well that ends well!

So, on with the photography workshop.  I missed the first day, but am in Monument Valley Utah as I type this.  This place is beautiful, and quite a long drive north from Phoenix.

I am hoping to post my first blog with photos at the end of tomorrow.

Life is a journey, and some times it's hard to see the big picture when things are not going well.  But I do believe there is good in things we wish did not occur, and that these experiences strengthen or prepare us for the unexpected in our journey, and maybe even help us to fulfill the purpose of our journey.

Be well.

3 days to departure and time to set up my blog - Yikes!

This blog has been setup to document my eight day trip to southern Utah. Three days are for travel and the remaining five are for a tour of photo ops.