Month: August 2024

Although I was spoiled with the results I’ve gotten using a MIOPS Smart trigger to capture lightning over the years, I stupidly forgot to put mine in my day pack. When we returned to The View as the sun was setting, we didn’t go back to our rooms so I could retrieve mine but instead went to the outside viewing area near the parking lot. Lightning was striking around us and the Mittens but I was reduced to using a small aperture to get a long shutter speed and to just clicking away in the hopes that I would capture a random bolt of lightning. And, by the luck of the click, I did! It’s barely visible just to the right of West Mitten’s thumb, in the middle of the colorful sunset.

Watching the sun as it rises behind East Mitten Butte is an experience in Monument Valley. If you time it just right, you can catch the sun perched precisely atop the thumb. That was not going to happen on this morning with bands of thick clouds directly behind the butte. As luck would have it, though, the sun escaped the clouds briefly as it passed behind the mitten’s thumb and peeked out from either side, creating a double starburst.

As we laid against the sloped sandstone and looked up, a large bird appeared above us, its neck and beak creating an archway. It was the Eye of the Sun in Monument Valley. Our Navajo guide, Helen, sang about the beauty of the place, as she added a rhythmic drum beat to accompany her song. The echos in the chamber surrounded us and created a calming, mesmerizing feeling, perfect for this enchanting place.

Anthropomorphism seems to run rampant in Monument Valley. The rock formations throughout the valley are reminiscent of many things with names born from the viewer’s cultural experiences. There are mittens, and a camel (that seems now more like Snoopy laying atop his doghouse than a camel), and elephants, and nuns (known as the three sisters). I don’t know the name of the formation on the left but I’m sure it has one. To me it is not a mitten, because it has five “fingers” so, more of a mitt——a baseball mitt—— reaching to catch the moon before it sets.

Our last morning in Monument Valley was a spectacular finish to a fabulous week of photography. I didn’t expect to see dense fog surrounding the buttes but it was there, creating ghostly vistas and sensuously caressing the red rocks. The rising sun added slight coloring to the morning sky and the color reflected off the craggy edges of the buttes.

West Mitten appeared and disappeared during the two hours I watched and photographed from my balcony at The View in Monument Valley. This is one of the last photographs I took just after 8:00AM last Friday morning while it was still partly visible. Two minutes later, it completely disappeared from view.

What a week we had in Monument Valley! No two sunrises were alike. Some were more colorful than others. We had lots of clouds, some bald skies, billowing thunderheads, and even fog! When I first peeked out about 5:00AM Friday morning, our last shoot before heading home, I could see nothing because a dense fog enveloped the entire valley. It was the thick, tule fog variety that clings to the ground and completely obscures visibility, the kind of fog that causes 100 car pileups on I-5 in the Central Valley of California. By 6:00AM the fog began to reveal the mittens and buttes. Over the next 2 hours, the fog teased us by completely obscuring the landmarks, then it would partially disappear as the winds cleared it away, only to return in a dense cloud. Some of the monuments seemed to attract fog like the one clump that clung to the base of East Mitten for about 30 minutes, and enveloped its thumb. By the time we had to call it quits a little after 8 AM, none of the monuments were visible. The fog had settled onto the valley floor and stayed there.

Monsoon Season brings clouds, rain, and lightning to Monument Valley. On our last evening there, we gathered on the upper patio at The View as we watched a storm develop and pass across the valley. There were only a few spatters of rain but the cloud to cloud lightning lit up the sky. Occasionally a few bolts of lightning struck the ground. I used a MIOPS Lightning Trigger to capture the events as they unfolded before our eyes. An interesting cloud formation hung above Merrick Butte as a double bolt of lightning struck the ground in the distance.

Horseshoe Bend is a 270° horseshoe shaped curve in the Colorado River in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area that attracts about 2 million visitors a year. In recent years, the site’s visibility has boomed because it has been popularized on social media. I can attest to that fact after seeing hundreds of people in the two hours we were there, posing for selfies while perched precariously on the edges of unfenced red sandstone outcroppings, doing handstands and jumping jacks, running up and down the slopes in unstable flip flops all apparently unaware of the stupidity of such actions. I stayed behind the protective fence on one edge where I took this photograph although most of the area surrounding the bend is not fenced. Swarms of people came and went, most barely acknowledging the stunningly gorgeous vista before them other than making it the backdrop for their carefully posed selfies.

Does this look like a western movie set? I think it does. I looked out from the balcony of my room at The View in Monument Valley the other afternoon as clouds began to fill the skies and what I saw made me feel as if John Wayne, in full western regalia, might suddenly appear on horseback and ride across the valley. The first John Wayne western I ever saw was a black and white film on my family’s 1949 era 12 inch Philco TV set and it was probably one of the many John Wayne westerns filmed in Monument Valley. But as I looked out at the mesas, the old time western vibe I felt was not black and white but more of a sepia look so I used Nikon’s Charcoal Picture Control setting when I took the photograph to give it that old time feel. John Wayne was on my mind because earlier in the day, we visited the Goulding’s Museum down the road from The View where the history of Monument Valley’s starring role in movies over the years was explained. The first western filmed here was “Stagecoach” in 1939 due to the efforts of Harry and Leone Goulding who owned a trading post adjacent to the Navajo Reservation in Monument Valley. The Navajo Reservation suffered during the Depression in the 1930’s. The Gouldings convinced a movie producer they encountered to use Monument Valley as the setting for his movie to help the local economy and the Navajos. As result, movie productions have been a local presence ever since then.

The morning sun begins to peek above the ridge between Totem Pole on the left and Yei Bi Chei on the right in Monument Valley. The Yei Bi Chei are Navajo spiritual gods. It’s always fun to get a starburst, pinching the sun as it emerges. Our guide, Helen, from Three Sisters Navajo Guides, accommodated our request to come here at sunrise although she’d never driven here because sometimes vehicles get stuck in the deep sand. After consulting a fellow guide about logistics, off we went, bumping along the narrow road until the Totem Pole came into view just as the sun was rising. Helen maneuvered the vehicle through the deep sand like the pro she is and we got our shots. The Totem Pole is an eroded mesa that now is merely a spire after millions of years of erosion. If you have ever seen the 1975 Clint Eastwood movie, The Eiger Sanction, this is the spire Clint Eastwood actually climbed for his role in the movie as his character prepared for his ascent on the Eiger (one of the Swiss Alps).

Sunrise from the balcony in Monument Valley.

They say “pink sky at night, sailor’s delight.” The pink sky last evening was an absolutely delightful beginning to our visit here in Monument Valley. We’d no sooner arrived at The View, our hotel in Monument Valley, than the sun began to set behind us. We looked out at the Mittens from the balconies of our rooms on the third floor; such a spectacular and iconic view. As far as I’m concerned, the view at The View has no equal.

What’s with the creepy maniacal severed clown head? Who’s the guy holding it and why is he holding it? Not to worry. The creepy mask was just a prop used in a photography workshop on shadows and silhouettes at the Lincoln Hills Photography Club a couple of days ago. The guy in the colorful shirt is my friend Truman, a talented photographer who often serves as the Master of Ceremonies at photography events in my area. His voice projects without a microphone but he sometimes uses one if he’s being recorded as in this shot. I thought that showing the microphone in the image depicted his Master of Ceremonies image well. He just happened to be holding the creepy mask, which, by the way, is his and it and other odd props show up on occasion in unexpected locales in his images. The challenge from the workshop was to do something imaginative with the silhouette and shadow images we captured during the morning session, including using sky replacement in Photoshop. This shot of Truman is one I took during the workshop. It is obviously neither a shadow nor a silhouette but it did seem to me to be a candidate for sky replacement so I placed Truman in front of the sky over Palouse Falls in a shot I took a couple of months ago.

Looking back at the photographs I took in Madera Canyon in June, I discovered that I had overlooked a series of images of the gorgeous Rivoli’s Hummingbird, at five inches, one of the largest hummingbirds that is seen in North America. I couldn’t resist creating a movie using just two images that mimic the wingbeats of the hummingbird in slow motion.

My obsession with creating gifs and time lapses seems to be taking over. I ran across a sequence of images of a White Ibis scratching its ear that I took early one February morning in Grand Isle, Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico. At that time I decided a gif would be the perfect way to share this set of images but I forgot about them until now. So here’s that long-delayed gif. It was a breezy morning and one of the Ibis’ feathers, floating on the surface of the water, blew away while it scratched that itch. I love the goofy look on the Ibis, with its red beak and blue eyes.

After a brief afternoon storm, the sun broke through the clouds on the Outer Banks this past May.

It was a pretty big stick to carry and a challenge to settle it onto the nest platform near the Duck Town Park Boardwalk in Duck, North Carolina. But, despite his efforts, the unimpressed female Osprey chucked the lichen covered stick over the edge of the nest and into the water just as soon as the male flew off again. At least I think I recall she waited until he left. It was a fascinating few days spent watching this pair build their nest and seeing what the female approved for its construction and what she tossed into the drink.

Another Caddo Lake Sunrise with a moody sky.

Willets have attitude. When they stroll down the beach, it’s like they’re sending a “don’t mess with me” message. Some of my favorite shots of Willets show them heading directly toward me and my lens and staring down the lens barrel. They always appear unruffled and undeterred, sort of an avian Joe Cool.