This photo is a by-product of my poor trip planning. The original plan was to drive from Grand Canyon to Utah along route US89 visiting some iconic landmarks as Horse Shoe Bend and later to make few stops around Lake Power.
But when we reach the intersection at Bitter Springs we realized that due to landslide US89 was completely closed and we had no choice but to take alternate US89A which runs along south side of the mountains.
Loc: 36.8175, -111.6328
My disappointment lasted for about 5-10min at most and then we entered beautiful House Rock Valley driving along Echo Cliffs which I featured in my previous post. When we reached Navajo Bridge in the evening I was even thankful that I totally disregarded Google Maps warnings and tried to drive the road which was closed.
Route US89A was practically deserted but we had to wait around 20 min before crossing the bridge because of the filming crew was shooting commercial there.
The view from the bridge was breathtaking even with Colorado river being practically empty, I guess due to snowless winter. We also were lucky to see California condors which were reintroduced here.
The HDR processing was an obvious choice for such a high dynamic range landscape.
Deconstructing Featured Photo
Camera: Canon 60D
Lens: Sigma 17-70mm
Focal Length: 17mm
ISO: 100
Aperture: F8
Bracketing: 3 shots (-2, 0, +2)
Tripod: FEISOL Tournament CT-3442
Ballhead: FEISOL CB-40D
Processing Steps
Lightroom: import, tagging, export to Photomatix
Photomatix: I used 3 images to tone map image (-2, 0, +2 ), 16-bit tiff image was exported to Lightroom.
Lightroom: straightening, cropping, export as PSD image
Photoshop: cleaning, contrast
Photoshop Plugins:
- Topaz DeNoise was used to reduce digital noise (sky )
- Topaz Detail was used to enhance details (canyons, mountains)
