Arizona Photography

Red Mountain at Sunset
Caught this fun sunset east of Red Mountain one afternoon. It seems to happen a lot where I head out with a particular shot in mind but in the process of shooting along the way - end up with something very different and more appealing than what I planned for. The desert was pretty thick after some good rains a few weeks earlier and I had to stop a couple of times for scenes that caught my eye - like this one. Lots of tall dead grass out there. The biggest challenge getting this shot was all those dang burrs that stick in my socks! I need some anti-burr hiking socks I guess.
Lake Powell Sunset from Alstrom Point
We have boated around, camped and flown over the Lake Powell area for decades and have been forever eager to get to one of those highly inaccessible but alluring plateaus on the north side. I recently became aware of this spot, Alstrom Point, which is accessible by a 2 hr 4x4 ride from Big Water. So I planned a trip during the astrophotography season to camp, shoot the sunset and to finally shoot the Milky Way over this awesome terrain - which requires a frame to the southeast. It all worked out without a hitch. We built a nice fire and grilled some awesome ribeyes right in front of this crazy scene - very cool. Just don't want to be stumbling around in the dark with our camp being literally at the edge of a 400-500 ft drop-off to the Lake level. This is an HDR edit panorama from four frames of 5 shots each - so a total of 20 images were used to compile what you see. I really can't get enough of the beautiful red rock layering of the Colorado Plateau
Arizona Saguaro Cactus Monsoon Lightning
Everyone loves lightning right? Can't image otherwise. And lightning storms are one of the coolest things about our monsoon season in Arizona. But a good lightning shot, like Milky Way shots - need something framable (or worthy of a shot all by itself) in the foreground - all part of the composition thing right? So first find yourself a cool foreground subject and line things up to get the lightning in the background. I lucked with this one. Stumbled onto this nice Saguaro which lined up well with a couple of others in the distance, and Red Mountain to the right also helped with the frame. I shot 22 exposures at this position and used five of them with good lightning - so this is a five shot composite. In other words, camera on the tripod, adjust the frame and focus then set the intervalometer to shoot every 10 seconds and hope for the best. The shots with the best lightning strikes are loaded into photoshop to create what we used to call double exposures - where two images are combined. But Photoshop lets us do that with many images - same cactus and foreground but with different lightning strikes all added together to create a single final composite. Cool thing here was that all the good lightning exposures were centered just right around and over my primary Saguaro ... planets were in alignment maybe? . . Technical; Sony A7Rii, Sony 24-105 f/4.0@4.0 24mm, 10 sec exp @200 ISO
Horseshoe Bend under the Stars
Horseshoe Bend is close to Page, Arizona but sp close the the city lights cause too much problem when shooting the stars. This shot took a whole lot of planning and work to both shoot and to process. First of all, the classic Horseshoe Bend shot is framed almost directly west - which doesn't work well if you want the colorful Milky Way in the frame. Most of the time, Milky Way frames are pointing to the southeast. The stars don't come this far west until August. It's also a little precarious to be hiking around the 800 ft drop in the middle of the night on what is hopefully a very dark night. What you see here was complied from about 40 exposures - a bunch for the starry sky and a bunch more to bring the minimal light out of the dark canyon.