Zion National Park

I fonally got around to assembling and culling some images from Zion National Park. I was there with my friend Dave for a weekend, followed by a hike to Calf Creek Falls in the Escalante area (more on that place later). We hiked the Narrows, shot some sunsets and sunrises and visited the Kolob Canyons area. Here is a sunset along the Virgin River:

This waterfall is at the start to the Narrows

This is a corner inside the Narrows. Some hikers are visible in the distance. I decided to not clone them out. Inside the Narrows, we met a few photographers. The interesting part was that many of them turned around at the first deep area because it was "impossible". It was actually lower than when I last was there and hardly a problem with the wet suits we were wearing. These things are quite amazing. I did not feel cold at any time, even though it turned out that when I after the hike entered the river wearing just Keenes on my feet, the water was very cold.

The light inside this place is quite strange. It gets a very strong orange color that makes the camera pick weird white balances. When I correct this using a grey card, however, the image appears far too warm, so I left it to my own creative devices and corrected to what I experienced. A white balance card does not work in these circumstances!

This is a sunset along the Virgin river looking at the Watchman and Bridge Mountain. There was some good fall color here.

This was just a tad upstream from the famous bridge, where every evening we came by throngs and throngs of photographers were standing all taking the same image. We resisted the temptation to join them. It is a very nice image though as evident from this image taken by Stephen Trainor who turned out to have been there the exact same weekend.

We also hiked up Taylor Creek in the Kolob Canyons area of Zion. Here we found that on that side of the park every single leaf had already been blown off. This was a strange contrast with the main area of the park, where fall color was mostly just starting! This is a nice reflection from a glowing canyon wall in a small waterfall we found.

This was another one of those areas where a white card white balance gave just too extreme results (you can see some of that in an image I posted earlier) so I dialed it down a little which brought back some other tones than yellow.

On our way out, we went east up through the tunnels and took some images on the checkerboard mesa area.

We had a fun weekend and saw some beautiful stuff there. Check out all images in this gallery. There is also a smaller photoset at flickr for those that like the social networking thing.

EDIT 1: Some more images are posted in the next post.