Arizona eScape

Written in 2005 -- We returned to Arizona and the Grand Canyon in 2005 for another river rafting trip, again with Jack Dykinga. We had great weather except for one night when rain threatened for a few hours (we only had a few drops in the end and then it cleared up about midnight) although it would have been interesting to see side canyons with flash floods and waterfalls all along the cliff edge. This time we had a full moon at the beginning of the trip, and the clear air made it seem like a floodlight was being blasted into your eyes as you tried to sleep. After the moon moved away from the zenith and went behind a cliff, it was marvelous to watch the Milky Way drift across the sky, interrupted with a few meteors now and then. The photos below are mine, shot on large format, and here are Ginette's, which she shot on digital.

For the second time, I produced a Christmas gift calendar in a limited edition of 10 (in 2003 I did my first one with a limited edition of 8), using these Grand Canyon images. The lead-off image on the cover was this panoramic view of the skyline from Pumpkin Springs taken in the late afternoon. The time from when the sun disappeared from the foreground cliff and the shadow started to rise on the background cliff was about 30 minutes. I liked the silhouette of the cacti and other plants against the glowing cliff face while keeping the foreground completely black.

For January I used this shot of a reflection pool at the top end of the hike up North Canyon. I was using the new Fuji Velvia 100 in QuickLoads, and this new film really picked up on the blue light from the sky. In general I fond it excessively contrasty in many lighting situations, with a slight magenta colour cast easily removed in Photoshop. The blue pickup from the sky was interesting in many shots as you will see, but was problematic in pure shade where things went excessively blue (and I mean excessive). I understand that Fuji is tinkering with the rendition of this film but I will be reverting back to Provia 100 for the next while due mainly to the contrast situation until I see a change.

While hiking back down to the river, we passed a lot Sacred Datura which was in sunshine. The contrast against the red sandstone was quite delightful. Datura has dangerous hallucinogenic properties when ingested, but to me the interesting thing is the flowers bloom at night and die the next morning. These flowers are already going but are not bad. Their perfume is wonderful in the early morning air. This was the February image.

One of my favourite images from this trip, these are the rapids of North Canyon, used for March. They are lit here by reflected light from the south cliff wall as well as the blue from the sky. In this case the tendency of the Velvia to pick up that blue really makes the picture.

For April, I jumped to the other end of the canyon with this shot of a lava cliff at Whitmore Rapids. There are huge lava flows in the canyon, very dark basaltic ones, which you see a lot of at the downstream end of the canyon. This particular lava flow went across river rubble (the rounded rocks due to river tumbling) and extended several hundred feet thick. There were a lot of interesting features in the cliff face, which at this time late in the day were picking up warm reflected light from the opposite wall. I particularly liked this one due to the large Easter Island face right in the middle.

For May, we stay at Whitmore Rapids with this shot of a Hedgehog cactus. The spines in the print seem like they will draw blood if you rub the print. The colour of the branches of the dead shrub is was another surprising effect of the new Fuji film, having once again picked up the intense blue of the sky. I was expecting the branches to come out silvery grey like the weathered wood they are, but this effect is pretty interesting as well. I shot this with the 81B warming filter as I was in shade, and it still picked up the blue on the branches even though the rest of the shot is natural colour.

For June, we move about halfway back along the canyon, to Granite Rapids. Granite had lots of interesting things to photograph but this particular shot was in the evening magic hour shoot. Storm clouds were moving along to the East from South to North, with very light rain falling on and off. A few minutes before this shot, we had a rainbow off to the right side, which I managed to get a reasonable shot of. But then the storm cloud picked up on the setting sun and turned this marvelous reddish orange. This was a tricky photograph to take due to the range of light -- the bottom portion with the rapids needed about 8 seconds while the top with the sky needed about 1 second. The irregular shape of the sky-mountain interface did not allow the use of a graduated ND filter, so the only choice was in-camera dodging using a second sheet of Quickload. I did it pretty well I think but the top of the mountain on the Left and on the right are a bit dark. Still, in-camera dodging is almost impossible to do on formats smaller than 4x5.

For July, we jump back to Pumpkin Springs, which was our last camp site of the trip. There were wonderful eroded rock formations at the downstream area of the beach. We had a couple of hours to shoot these in soft reflected light before things got too dark. It makes you wonder what other formations you passed in the preceding 200 miles . . . .

August was looking downstream from Whitmore Rapids, with a bigger than life rock formation and the gentle curve of the Colorado river. Just slightly to the left of center before the river disappears you can just see the raft of one of the private tours as a small dark "blob" on the river. Without knowing this, you just cannot tell the scale of the place.

For September we jump back to about the halfway point at Mile 120. This is the area we shot Conquistador Aisle (see later) as well as Blacktail Canyon which is slightly upstream and across the other side. This area had a large rock bed with the beach area, with large amounts of river rock, sand and some hardy plants. Well, this is the desert so most plants are hardy. What we found fascinating is the huge variety of the rocks here. They have traveled over thousands, if not millions, of years, from many different geological layers and they are almost all different. I was drawn to this particular composition due to the reddish rock on the left. In several thousand square meters of area I did not see another like it and I really wonder where it came from.

The month of October featured a little stream running through National Canyon. We were a bit lucky in that I got this shot but then the sun went behind a cloud and we lost the reflected light. Without the gold highlights, this would not be anywhere near as interesting. I set up for another shot on another part of the stream but after an hour I packed up ands went back to camp without taking another shot.

November featured Conquistador Aisle. This is a wonderful view looking downstream. The fascination here is the great buttresses along the right. We had pretty amazing light here. The first part of dawn, before the light made it down into the canyon bottom, had wonderfully huge cumulous clouds over the far horizon, lit with a strong yellow-gold light. Then the light played cat-and-mouse with clouds on the eastern horizon as it moved down the far butte, providing lots of opportunity to show differential lighting on the far wall. Finally we had this shot with the river picking up the molten copper colour of the rock mixed with the blue of the sky. It was a wonderful morning !

And finally, December. Back at Whitmore Wash, not that far from the hedgehog cactus shot above, I spied these two young barrel cactus growing in an invisible crack in a huge lava rock. The red tipped spines against the green cactus body told me this was either a December calendar photo or a Christmas card. The calendar won. What you cannot tell from this photo is at my feet I was standing in between two large anthills. Anthills in Arizona are often about a meter in diameter, as were these, but the really interesting things was one had black ants and one had red ants and they were at war with each other. I think the reds were winning but I am not sure about ant rules of war. In any event, I had to be careful where I stood but thankfully they were more interested in each other than attacking me.

An finally, one shot I prepared but decided not to use in the calendar, is this shot of fluted schist. The schist is nearly black in colour but having been polished by the action of the river erosion it tends to pick up the colour of reflected light extremely well. This wall picked up the red of granite (of which there were several intrusions in the formation) as well as the blue of the sky. While it looked blue to the eye as well in real life, the Fuji Velvia 100 exaggerated it that much more.

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Written in 2000 -- The photographs below this point are the end result of a number of trips to Arizona. Arizona is a photographers paradise, with amazing vistas seemingly everywhere one looks. While I have quite a backlog of photos still to work through, these were all taken using large format in the last couple of years. The key event that 'caused' a lot these photos was a wonderful rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in May 2000.

The workshop, organized by The Friends of Arizona Highways was special in two ways. For one, we had Jack Dykinga as a workshop leader and Jack is a great teacher and an all around fun guy. And two, we had a team from the local Phoenix PBS Television Station, KAET, along to film us and Jack as pert of a documentary of three great photographers working in Arizona. This video is available for purchase from their web site (as well as lots of info about the trip) at www.azcentral.com/imagesofarizona. This made the trip all that more exciting, as if it needed any help.

We entered the Colorado River at Lees Ferry and rafted down to North Canyon for the first night. We amused ourselves around the rapids in the river for a good couple of hours until dinner. The next morning we awoke early (like around 4:30) and hiked up North Canyon with the video crew running around like crazy trying to keep up. We had a great time with our first "magic hour" shoot.

We then packed up the raft and continued down the river. Generally we did not shoot in the middle of the day but Jack arranged the camping spots so we had good access to early morning and late afternoon photography.

The highlights for me were really two places -- Elves Chasm, which has one great waterfall with the potential for many different ways to "dissect" that one image into many unique detail shots, and Matkatamiba Canyon, or Matkat for short. Matkat was a wonderful place, with so many photo opportunities but only the one "magic hour" to play in. Jack managed to arrange for us to be their early, and since there is only enough parking places for two rafts, we had the place to ourselves -- no fighting with non-photographers for the scenery. This first image is looking downstream

This second image is the same canyon looking upstream. The first is my favourite image from the trip, but the knife edge reflection in the second is wonderful as well. Quite the difference in the feeling of the canyon between the two shots ! The canyon wall in the back of the lower photo was almost going to be in full sun, and as a result glows like glowing magma. A couple of people were convinced this was a volcano and have asked me if it was lava !

In the same canyon, I came across a wonderful reflection with reeds in the water and the sun caressed cliffs with blue sky in the shot. This shot confuses many people, especially non-photographer ones, and I have great fun with it.

It was interesting and wonderful to be completely cut off from the world for a week, and I mean completely. All you could do was have fun. The boat crew was wonderful as well -- I would recommend AZRA (Arizona Rafting Adventures) anytime.

Later that same year, in October, I spent a couple of weeks in other parts of Arizona that I had either missed before, or wanted to get back to. The one photo from this trip I have include here is of an organpipe cactus, taken in the Organpipe National Monument. This was one of those serendipitous moments -- we had gone out looking for a backlit organpipe photo, so we had to try to find one that had something dark behind it. We finally found one late in the day of the last day of vacation. There was only one spot to set up the shot, closer and I went down the hill putting the top of the cactus into the sky, further away and I would have to go up the hill a lot which ruined the composition. Left and the cactus also moved into the sky, and right and I fell into a ravine. So, this was THE spot. I set up using the 300 mm lens and a compendium lens shade to get the light off the front element. I decided to take four sheets of film with a bit of bracketing since I was not positive about the correct exposure for this particular backlighting. I took the four sheets while also busy balancing in THE spot, and went away happy.

Once home with the film processed, I was even happier, since unbeknownst to me at the time a large grasshopper had landed on the side of the cactus for the middle two shots only, and one of those was the perfect exposure ! Sometimes the luck is actually with you. It may be a bit difficult to see in this small photo -- it is on the right, a short distance down from the top on the longest pipe.

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