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!