Santa Elena Canyon

The showpiece location of Big Bend National Park is Santa Elena Canyon.  If you ever make it here and have just one night, the place you want to see sunrise is here at the canyon.


Calling this location spectacular is an understatement.


Here the Rio Grande flows out of the 1500' deep canyon it has carved in the Sierra Ponce wall.  You can stand at the rivers edge and look up and into it.  This is as awe inspiring of a location as the Grand Canyon and it is a whole lot easier to see and experience as it is just 100 yards from the parking lot.  Not that I am against a long arduous hike to get someplace, but as the large format photographers can tell you, close to the road is sometimes nice.



I had arrived in Big Bend one day last month to some amazing clouds and had one of my best days ever for photography.  I woke up on day two to clear skies and decided to photograph the canyon.  The clear skies should put nice light on the canyon and if I framed it right I could avoid too much empty blue sky.


When I normally photograph the canyon, it is from the mouth of the canyon as I cannot help but be drawn to the rivers edge and that huge wall right in front of you.  Well, I decided to try a different shot and went to the overlook, which is about 1/2 mile away from the canyon.  If you ever saw Ansel Adams image of Santa Elena Canyon, it was taken from the overlook.  The view here is less about the river as it is harder to pick out in the distance and more about the canyon cliff face.


I set up the camera in the dark and chose a longer lens.  Focused.  Decided this is a location all about the orange glow on the wall and went with Velvia 100F.  Waited.  When first light touched the top of the canyon walls I took an image.  When it got all the way to the bottom of the wall I took a second.  Then I switched to black and white.  I am still have yet to get the b+w images developed but the color looked good and is the image here.


What a way and place to watch the sunrise.

In the house of Saint Ansel

Over the summer I spent a week in Yosemite. It was my fourth trip and it is a place that keeps drawing me back.

Every time I photograph here, I see the famous images Ansel made. John Muir may have saved Yosemite, but Ansel took it's fame to a whole new level with his photography. The Ansel Adams Gallery is still doing business in the park. By the way- this is as much of a must see stop as anything else in the park. Not only can you see the work of Ansel, but many other modern masters of the Sierra- Bill Neil, John Sexton, Alan Ross, and Mike Frye to name a few.

When I was in the park this summer I set about planning which icons I would photograph. High on my list was El Capitan. This huge wedge of granite dominates the front half of Yosemite valley and is a draw for climbers from around the world.

I photographed El Cap from several different locations. Each one seemingly already made famous by a great photograph (or three). That makes it difficult to be there, because every place I stopped I thought of how Ansel made this or that from here or of that rock. It also did not help that the sky was "severe clear" and the summer drought in California had already dried up most of the waterfalls by June. Still, this was Yosemite and I was not about to let things get in the way of being there with my camera.

One morning, I was down along the Merced River and could see El Cap rising above the river and the trees. It was already well on in the morning (at least for me). I normally do most of my photography in the twilight before the sun appears in the sky. One thing about Yosemite, though, is that it is so deep the light does not get into the valley for over an hour after sunrise. That was the case here. The light was just striking the east face of El Capitan and I knew I had to get an image.

It required a little bit of work and a wide angle lens. The mountain is so big you need a wide lens to get the river and the rock which towers above it. You also need a good filter to hold back the bright sky from the darker river area. It took a while and I made use of the view camera's ability of rise and the grad filter to keep the sky from blowing out. I took a color image but I already had the idea that this might be a good trip and location to do conversion to black and white.

After I made the image, I just stood there staring up at the big rock. It sure is impressive from any angle and I know why Ansel kept coming here.

W.W.A.D.

W.W.A.D. What Would Ansel Do?

It is a beautiful September morning in Colorado. The sky is blue. The clouds go from orange to pink to white. The aspen are yellow, green, or even reddish. Colors are everywhere. Bright, bold, vivid colors. It is autumn after all and colors abound. Everything about the setting screams color. I naturally reach for a box of Velvia with color like this.

But what would Ansel do if he were here? Well, Ansel being Ansel, he would probably still take a black and white negative and come away with a print that was so sharp, deep, and glowing, that it would make you want to give up trying to ever make an image here yourself.

I like black and white images, but I am really a color photographer. I sometimes dabble in monochrome but my work and images are mainly color. Still I often take some black and white film with me on a trip-just in case. However, Colorado in autumn is not one of those trips that jump to mind for it, so I did not bring any.

So as I pondered what Ansel would do with a scene like this I flipped a switch on the digital camera to B+W and took a couple of quick images and surprise! They looked pretty good. So while, I did not have black and white film to use in the 4x5, I had "black and white" pixels I could use in a little digital camera. So I made a few images with the thought of working these into monochrome.

When I got back home to my computer I tried working with a few images and did a little Photoshopping out the color. I liked what I saw. I found that monochrome can make a great "fall image". Actually, the wonders of modern computer programming allow you to do a lot of neat things with images that would take ages in the darkroom to learn. I am able to take an image to monochrome and tweak it with a lot of darkroom like techniques and get a very respectable black and white, or sepia, or other type of traditional look.

As I worked with this image, I was quite pleased with the qualities I was able to find in the monochrome world. The quality of the sky, the definition in the peaks, the glow of the aspens. It was all there. It was autumn in black and white.

Maybe that is exactly what Ansel would have done.