Travels to the Grand Canyon: July 1998
To drive to the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas, you drive over Hoover Dam, so we thought we might as well stop. The plaques commemorating those who worked on the dam are in nifty 30's art deco fonts, and the dam itself is HUGE...Maybe they planned this on purpose so we start getting used to large deep holes before we get to the Grand Canyon...?
I hung onto my camera tightly, looped it around my neck, and leaned carefully over the massive concrete railing to take this picture...Getting sick yet?
Vista Point? I guess...at least you can see that the mountains in the desert are different now that we're in Arizona...more of the mesas with the flat tops than the normal pointy mountains in Nevada...
This is the first glimpse of the Grand Canyon most people see, and believe me, you're starting to wonder how you can possibly come so close to it through the trees without seeing any hint of the "Grand Canyon"! Mather Point is the first place you can stop on the main road inside the national park gates, so here we are! Knowing this is Mather Point, you can find where we are on the map below...
This is a map of the East Rim of the Grand Canyon. The West Rim is closed to private vehicles in the summer, and they run shuttles that direction. Since we didn't get to catch a glimpse of the Canyon until 4pm, we decided we'd just take our own drive along the East Rim as far as we could go, then watch the sunset from Desert View, looking back over the Canyon...
Voila! It's a huge, deep hole behind me! (Good thing the wind didn't pick up, or this might be a really interesting picture...)
As you can tell from my other photos, I like framing my subjects...and here I had many opportunities to do so...
I don't think any photograph I've ever seen does the size and grandeur of the Grand Canyon justice...Here I tried my best to give a sense of the depth and the width, but it still doesn't seem BIG enough...
I wasn't the only one who liked the framing with the sharp trees in the foreground around the soft shadows of the canyon in the background...Another woman waited with me as a teenage couple sat on the outcropping there for what seemed like a full twenty minutes before they finally left!
I liked the contrast between the red cliffs and the green foliage here...
I really like the levels in this one...I have the extremely close branch on the left, the bush at the bottom, the tree at the right, then the levels of the canyon even farther back...and the different shades of green vs. the varying shades of red, too...
More levels...I thought that would be the best way to try to portray the extreme width of the canyon...
With the sun starting to get lower in the sky, more interesting shadows started to develop, showing even more distinct levels, and also lending more contrast between the softness of the shadows and the cripsness of the crags in the foreground...
This is one of Marcus' shots with his polarizing filter to cut out some of the haze, and his "real" camera (not my weenie little point-and-shoot Canon SureShot)...You can see that the striations in the rock are much clearer...
See how far it just keeps on going? If you look back at the map, you can see that the canyon keeps going north from the edge where Desert View is...Since we're getting closer to Desert View, we can see the canyon continuing north...
More levels facing north...I think this is one of the better ones for giving a sense of how the Grand Canyon is made up of many smaller canyons, which is what gives it so many levels across the width of the "Grand" Canyon...
...and a very similar shot with Marcus' camera...see how much crisper the detail is?
This is one of my artistically favorite shots...I like the contrast of the craggy tree sharp and lacking color in the foreground, while you can glimpse the soft, muted colors of the canyon through the trees...
Here's Marcus at the edge of the Grand Canyon...don't step back any farther!
These are more examples of why real photographers get better pictures...The polarizing filter removes some of the haze that was in the canyon that day, AND the lens just captures better detail anyway...
...same here...but do you see what I mean how you can't really tell how far across it goes? It tends to all blend in together like one long wall, when many of those are actually sticking up in the middle...
Well, we reached our goal just in time...sunset at Desert View...This was taken with my camera, and I tried to get how the Colorado River was still catching the fading light...
...but you can see again how Marcus' camera beats out mine...Also, mine would have started to flash soon after my shot, which would make the whole sunset effect pointless...
There is some of the Painted Desert behind the edge of the canyon...The light was fading so quickly, Marcus was lucky to get this shot...
The sky was actually more orange by this time, but it looks like they exposed for the foreground and let the sky go white, when that wasn't the effect Marcus wanted, but the glowing river is still pretty, I think...
Another problem with how the print was developed, we think...it really was sunset, believe us! The sky was glowing orange, but since there were no clouds, I'll have to admit that the only reason it was impressive was because it was the Grand Canyon...
Fun with fill-in flash...this was my idea, but the best backround shot had my eyes closed (oh, well), so I took the other shot, copied & resized my open eyes, and Photoshopped them into this image...hee, hee...
Since there's not much to see after the sun goes down (at 8pm that day), we drove straight back to Las Vegas (after dinner at Wendy's in Tusayan)...since Marcus was driving and we had the Miata, it only took us 5 hours to get back...then we had to get up the next morning, check out, then drive all the way back to San Jose, which took us 10 hours...Needless to say, my brand-new Miata hit 5000 miles by the end of that trip, and it was less than three months old at the time!
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