Zion National Park – Riverside Walk

In our family, Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate our blessings, the greatest of which is each other.  This year we gave thanks in our most cherished place on the earth – Zion National Park in southwest Utah.  Over the years it has truly been our refuge and a place we go to rekindle our spirits.

We never fail to take the River Walk trail to the Gateway to the Narrows.  With camera firmly attached to tripod and tripod jontily perched on my shoulder I traveled the trail, open to that one scene that captured the beauty of the canyon and what Zion has come to mean to us.  This is it.

Riverside Walk

Some photographs require weeks and even months to find their voice.  This one came together in just a couple of evenings, almost as if it was meant to be.

For those interested in the technical details, here’s a quick outline.

On location, the photograph was shot with my trusty Canon 10D with the 24-70 f/2.3L lens.  Over the course of our trek I had tried several other compositions before finding this one – the last one.  It’s interesting how you get into a place and the best composition through a sort of trial and error process.

Given the dynamic range of the scene, it was not going to be possible to capture it in a single exposure without loosing the highlights, shadows or, more likely, both.  So I took four shots varying the exposure so that one correctly exposed the shadows and another, the highlights.  The two remaining filled in the middle.

Back in the digital darkroom each of the images went through some processing before they were finally blended together into a single image.  In the first step, each image was individually processed in DxO to remove camera and lens distortions.  Little else was done to the images.

The next step was to blend the four images into one using PhotoMatix.  Again, other than the basic functionality of PhotoMatix (create the 32 bit HDR image and then tone map it back to 16 bits), the adjustments in tone mapping were kept to a minimum.

Lightroom didn’t really play a significant role in this image although some global tweaking was performed.

The image was finished in Photoshop.  The adjustments in PhotoShop were aimed at two things – controlling the light to draw the eye to the key elements and intensifying the color to give the image its emotional impact.

There was one start-over; that is, the image got to an unsatisfactory place from which the only recovery was to start the process all over again from the beginning.

A handful of artist proofs were printed to get the soft proofing and printer settings just right but no more than five or six were required.  This is unlike most images that frequently require a dozen or more.

All in all, this image came together very quickly and as a result is even more of a delight.  It’s as though it was eager to be seen.

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Author: doinlight

Ralph Nordstrom is an award-winning fine art landscape photographer and educator. He lives in Southern California and leads photography workshops throughout the Western United States.

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