Post Your Best Landscapes

  • Thread starter Thread starter Marshal.F
  • Start date Start date
ray5 said:
Beautiful! Going there myself in Sept. Can't wait. Please share your experiences and suggestions. Did you go anywhere else? Thx
Ray

Thanks! I sent you a PM but here are a few tips:

You definitely want to do the dedicated photo tours as you will be able to bring a tripod and you will have more time to get your shots (your guides also help control traffic for you).

I would also recommend using a cable release and bracket your exposures because there can be some really bright spots and dark areas in the same scene. I used my widest lens (10-18mm on a 70D). If I had to choose one lens it would be my widest lens, although there were times when I wanted to use a longer lens to focus in on smaller areas. You won't have time to change lenses though, and it gets dusty in the canyons so you probably wouldn't want to anyway. Try to avoid the sky in your shots if it is really bright. The sky can be so much brighter than the canyon that it will blow out even with bracketing. I will say though that I got a couple of shots with a blue sky above the canyon that turned out ok, but my best shots were of the interior of the canyon only. Sometimes it's tough to avoid the hot spots but it makes for better shots if you can keep them out of the frame.

The guide I went with on the lower canyon tour said she thinks the light is the best in the lower canyon around 8:00 AM. My tour was at 10:30 and the light was ok, but there were a lot of bright spots in parts of the canyon at that time. So if I were you I would try to do one of the 8:00 or 8:30 tours in the lower canyon. The upper canyon is supposed to be best when the sun is straight up, so I would try to get a tour around noon or so. My tour of the upper canyon was at 1:30 PM and it was a little dark inside, although there were some nice colors toward the top of the canyon. But if you want to get light beams in the upper canyon I think midday is the best.

Here's another shot I liked from the trip:

Passage
by Justin Kane, on Flickr
 
Upvote 0