It’s been a long time coming, it has to be said. For well over a year, I’ve wanted to shoot Antelope Canyon, having seen a few random photos of it on the web some time ago. The problem is, flying to Arizona purely to shoot one Canyon is a little bit over the top, so this was my opportunity to combine it with a US National Parks shoot – cool 🙂 With around 30GB of images of the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Monument Valley, etc – I do feel a little guilty skipping straight to these images, but there are two big reasons…
1) Antelope Canyon is the one set of images I’ve wanted for the longest, and…
2) AMAZINGLY, these shots needed NO retouching. No colour correction, no nothing. Photoshop wasn’t even opened to “finish” these images – just a little clarity and lens corrections in Lightroom, along with a touch of sharpening. Now that impressed me. These are the real thing – this is actually what we SAW.
So, where is Antelope Canyon? Honestly, half way between a small town called Page in Arizona and the middle of nowhere! You can’t go in alone (as with many slot Canyons), so you have to be guided by one of the Native Indian Reservation approved guides. This all booked, we entered the Canyon to shoot…
There is a TINY window of 1.5 hours, during certain months of the year, where the shafts of light spray down from above. The only way to see them is to visit in Summer, and it’s fair to say I wasn’t the only one with that idea! To say it was a “rush” would be an understatement. imagine a group of photographers, all looking for that one shot, but all at the same time! That, along with the 100+ degree heat and other tour groups in there made for a very sweaty and stressful 2 hours in total. That said… Hey, I got the shots I wanted! 😉
Once the rush for the light shafts had passed, we had a bit more time to explore a lot of the different views in there – including the famous “Arizona Waterfall” of sand…
So how did I do? Well, I snapped around 120 images, 12 of which are in the “gallery” below. Hopefully they’ll give you a little bit of inspiration to head out to Arizona someday. The Grand Canyon is jaw-dropping, Monument Valley is majestic, Death Valley is like another planet – but sometimes (just sometimes) it’s the little out of the way places that bring the most inspiration 🙂
“Antelope Canyon” – Prints available to buy now