Explosion of Sandstone

One of my favorites from my road trip this month to Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, Arizona.

More photos from this place: http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2018/05/20/white-pocket-arizona/

I saw the clouds moving so I knew a long exposures would be best. Fortunately it was pretty deep into twilight, so I was able to use a circular polarizer as a 2-stop ND filter to lengthen exposure, cut glare from sand crystals in the rock to get the full color (make the clouds pop a bit), and combine 8, 15 and 30-second exposures in Photomatix HDR software to fully extract rock texture (while blending in in the longest exposure to preserve the cloud movement and not have too much of an "HDR-look").

The f-stop ended up being f/8 and I had to raise the ISO to 640 by this point, but at 16mm there was more than enough depth of field, and the noise wasn't bad after I knocked it down a bit more on the underexposed and 0EV images.

That's what's great about photography, there are so many ways to come to a result, but sometimes the tradeoffs, in motion vs. shutter speed, depth of field vs. noise, color & contract (polarizing) vs. ISO, can incrementally point to a path that helps achieve a certain vision you have in your head for the scene (like the moving clouds), or how to best reflect what you see and experience.

#Arizona #landscapephotography #VermilionCliffsNationalMonument #travel