Horseshoe Bend

The Selfie Craze

Stood on the edge of Horseshoe Bend in Page, AZ and peered down into the abyss. It was a long way down and sudden death if one stepped too close. I'm told no one has fallen yet (hard to believe) but that day inevitable due to a new craze that's sweeping the world ... the selfie stick. For those of you who've been living in a cave for the last couple of years, a selfie stick allows you to mount your camera (usually a cell phone but now even large tablets) on a long stick and to take a picture of yourself without assistance. Just hold the pole in one hand and smile. Nice idea for the terminally self-absorbed but potentially fatal in a place like Horseshoe Bend. I was talking to Kevin Burk, a pro photographer from LA, a few days ago and he pointed this out to me. He'd watched several Chinese tourists, with their selfie sticks fully extended, edging ever closer to the canyon edge in pursuit of the perfect picture ... their ugly mugs dead center in the Colorado River. I saw the same thing when I was there but didn't make the connection. They were so intent on getting that picture that they didn't even know where the edge was. Just looking at the cell phone and getting ever closer to the edge ... and the first fatality at Horseshoe Bend ... ?

Horseshoe Bend

I wandered up and down the path leading to the bend several times, lugging all my gear. Didn't exactly know what to expect but, when I finally arrived, the panorama is breathtaking. You stand on the edge, without protection, and look into this deep river valley. Wondered how many people had fallen. I took a few test photos and went back to my truck to prepare. I wanted to be on the edge as the sun set. Unfortunately, there were few clouds in the sky so the best I could hope for was sky glow. Even that would give me an interesting image for sure. Spent a while getting my generator running (I'd left Albuquerque with it still unchecked) and setting up my nodal slide. There's a unique rotation point for your lens (and for each zoom setting) where parallax just cancels out. If you're interested, check out the many videos that show how to find the nodal point for your lens on YouTube.

Anyway, the time finally came and I once again trudged up and down the hill until I stood at the edge. As is often the case, all the tourists had fled and only the diehard remained. I found a great place for my setup and waited. I'd decided to do an HDR panograph as this is really the only way to capture both the grandeur and amazing depth of color that emerges as the sun rises.

The Bend at Sunset - 16mm (1.6 crop), f/18, varying exposure, ISO 100 license CC BY-NC 4.0

Click on the image to get a larger view. Processing was a challenge. I'd let the camera decide on exposure levels because the light varied so much from one angle to the next. I took two rows of images, one down in the canyon and another capturing the sky. I took a representative set of images into Photomatix and made my adjustments until I had a reasonable result. One has to be careful not to overdo the sliders as you can get a very freaky result. Then I batch processed all the images using the settings from my test run. I've been testing both Photoshop and Hugin (an open source pano stitcher) and have, for the most part, settled on Photoshop. Hugin does weird things with your images and I'm just not comfortable relying on it yet. Photoshop does a great job with pano stitching. I use the cylindrical setting and check all the boxes (vignette and distortion correction) and then sit back to see what it does. Now, the problem comes when the dynamic range of the images gets too extreme. Photoshop adjusts exposure levels on the images until you get seamless integration. In the case of this image, the far reaches of the canyon were in deep shadow and basically disappeared in the initial run. I tried several approaches to fix the problem but nothing worked. Simply lightening the recesses produced a very flat, lifeless image that I found unsatisfying. I put the image aside for a few days and let my subconscious think ponder on the problem. I've found over the years that it is much smarter than the rest of my brain. Finally, after a few days, the solution appeared. I took the brightest images from the brackets and made another pano from them ... with the exact same settings. What emerged was a very bright image with the shadows now visible and useable. I carefully overlay this on the main pano (on a separate layer) and then created a luminosity mask that selected shadows so I only worked in the the darker parts and had automatic feathering on the edges. With a feathered brush I worked the shadows, letting the brightest layer come through. I made several other minor adjustments including enhancing the greens along the river and the result is shown above. It's dark and ominous but that's the effect I wanted. I've seen so many images of this landscape where the photographer has worked to bring out the bright colors and it looks fake (but does wonders on the tourist brochures). That's not what you see at sunset. You see a bright sky and the canyon in shadow. So, what you see in this image is what it looks like as you stare into the canyon (at least to my eye).