Talk to anyone about the American Wild West, and you’re likely to conjure up those famous scenes from cowboy movies shown all across the world – and most likely, in a landscape such as Monument Valley.
Indeed, if you want to “relive” those years that never actually happened here, you can pay to be dressed head-to-toe for your 2 minutes of fame as they click the button and get a shot of you on horseback at John Ford’s Point. (No, that’s not me – and no, I never have…)
But the reality is, Monument Valley itself was very unlikely to have been a part of what was considered the “Wild West”, and it was simply that John Ford capitalised on its 5 square miles of movie-set-ready location for filming.
What has remained consistent, however, over the years – is the lure of the iconic East and West Mittens and Merrick Butte when it comes to photographing this stunning landscape.
Pick the right time of year and you have a choice of perfectly aligned silhouettes at sunset, incredible blankets of stars under a thin slither of moonlight, or epic sunrises that light up the sky above.
And then, there’s “that rock”.
I like that rock. I’ve shot it, and from it, many times over the years – and as the sun falls, it manages to glow just at the right point to create a foreground interest with which to capture the buttes behind.
And on this occasion, it wasn’t the shapes and shadows I was looking for (seemingly unlike everyone else in the park at this time of year) – it was a bit of old-school luck.
That, and some patience as I tried out something rather silly (given the tools I have in my other kit) – to manually capture a focus stack series at just the right time for this shot:
Spoiler alert – I did, it worked, the end.
But there are lots of questions about when and why to focus stack (along with how, and when not to do it), that I figured might be worth explaining.
So, step one – let’s zoom past the famous “Forest Gump mile marker” and get into the valley itself.
“The View” – not just the name of the only hotel on site, is actually a pretty easy one to shoot, photographically.
On any lens wider than about 100mm equivalent, you’re going to find everything is “out there” and at infinity, so shooting away at a nice clean f/8 or at a push f/11 should give you an image which is sharp from front to back, with a picture-perfect trio of buttes and mittens that balance the frame.
But what happens when I add that foreground interest?
On an iPhone (below), it’s pretty easy. With a wide lens and tiny sensor, we rarely have a depth of field that’s shallow enough to worry about focus fall-off from close to far.
But what about on a “big camera” – a proper full frame medium format digital back like the Phase One IQ4 150MP?
That little box of tricks can bring as much in the way of challenges as it does in perfection – with shallow depths of field and extremely precise lenses. In this case, while the wide view below was impressive on my iPhone, I wanted to try and get a 70mm, vertical, near-to-far shot of my contemplation rock (as I now call it) and one of the mittens behind.
So what’s the problem?
Well, at 70mm – even if we were shooting at f/22, or even f/32 – we simply can’t get enough depth of field that would mean the focus ran sharp from a couple of feet away, all the way out to infinity.
And even if we did, that tiny aperture we’d need to use would give us a lot of diffraction – which isn’t nice for print, or my eyes…
We could use a tilt lens – there’s a lovely 70mm Rodenstock tilt lens available for the XT – but remember my challenge? I wanted a vertical shot. As it stands, for now the XT only has tilt on the landscape-oriented plane.
I could have shot it using an XF camera, with 40-80mm zoom and automated focus stacking – but where would the fun be in that? (Plus, those Rodenstock lenses somehow define an entirely new meaning of sharpness.)
So, we’re focus stacking on a technical/field camera, manually.
And why focus stack? Well, because at any usable aperture (think: f/8-16 at the very worst I’d consider) the Monument Valley scene is just too “deep” to be shot in one go.
Instead, we take several “slices” and then “stack” them together (in software), making use of the sharpest pixels in each slice.
To picture how that works, imagine the same scene but split up into 4 different depth-of-field ranges, as below:
While automated systems (such as the one employed by the Phase One XF camera) can do those slices for you, it’s equally possible to shift the focus each time (with a little bit of calculating and guesswork and a lot of care when it comes to not moving the camera) to get the slices we need.
Of course, you need to be careful with things moving between frames, but where I was shooting in pre-sunset daylight (unlike the shot above), it was only the solo cloud I was worried about and that didn’t seem to be moving too much.
It’s then time to load it into some stacking software – of which there’s no shortage, but I’ve found Helicon Focus to be the most reliable and accurate way of mapping each image to its relative sharpness and blending them all together.
Using the Depth Map approach, it takes each pre-processed full 151mp shot, finds the sharpest areas, and then stitches the 4 (in this case) together with all the sharpest bits included.
As long as you shot the slices with enough overlap of areas in focus, the result is a perfectly sharp image from 2ft to 2,000,000ft – you could say “to infinity and beyond…”
Combine an accurate, successful, focus stack with those incredible Rodenstock lenses, and you really do have a stunning example of a scene that even the human eye can’t manage in one go.
The details in that rock up-close, through to those of the giant boulders and crumbling mittens in the distance – and even the plateaus and tables in the far beyond – it’s all there, sharp as a Japanese chef’s knife…
And why would we want things that sharp, that big?
Simple…
To take on road trips, with your weird art dealer, to show interior designers what we really mean by “this will print big” – especially when it’s intricate enough to be sat right next to it and find details in all directions.
Turns out, if you unroll one of these shots in the middle of a decent French restaurant in Naples, FL – even the waiters stop to take a look…
Now of course, there are a few other benefits to staying at “The View” (the quality of food or service is still not one of them.)
Mostly, it’s the ability to make decisions based on the weather that’s happening right now, without the need to commit to a long drive and be disappointed on arrival.
But it’s also about those balconies…
With relatively dark skies all around (apart from the huge glow coming from nearby towns…) you can get quite the view of the stars at night. A bit of moonlight helps, of course, which wasn’t there this time – but it’s still not a bad way of watching the world go by.
Just set your camera up on the deck at night, hit the interval option, and wake up to a timelapse in the morning.
Can’t really complain about that level of reward vs “effort”…!
So, giant focus stacks (with a lucky cloud), Milky Way shots, night sky timelapses, sunrises and sunsets – what more could you want?
That’s right – a drone shot, of course!
Only… Wait.
Nope – you’re not going to get one of those, as you can’t fly a drone in Navajo Tribal Parks (just as with most other US National Parks too).
Why?
Because they’re annoying. Because they interfere with wildlife. Because they interfere with the enjoyment of others in the park. Because they’re often flown recklessly. Because they’re constantly used in locations despite rules that dictate otherwise. Because they’re flown irresponsibly at distances where people can’t possibly deal with a problem.
And I say that as a fully licensed commercial Drone operator in several countries.
Even with a commercial filming permit – which you need if you intend to use your images commercially – that still doesn’t allow for drone use in the park.
And just in case you missed it – it’s even there on the application forms themselves, for commercial filming – NO DRONES.
So then, let’s look at all the content that has been made, from drones, and available alongside thousands of others on all of the stock sites out there:
^ This.
This, is why we can’t have nice things.
Please people – you are not the exception, yes “just this one time” DOES cause damage, and no, you are not without blame if you’ve ever done this.
Stop – before drones get banned for any form of flying – not just in certain places.
Oh, and speaking of things being banned.
Can we please ban:
- O’Doul’s Alcohol Free Beer – It’s not a lack of alcohol issue, it’s that you’re drinking something modelled on the urine of a mule.
- “Navajo Tacos” at Amigo’s – They’re bigger than your head, the specific weight of Jupiter and that lettuce isn’t doing any good.
- Pre-packagd Cheese Croissants – Sacre bleu.
- Reeses Potato Chips Cups – I mean, WHY? Whyyyyyyyy?
Sometimes, ‘merca, it’s a no.
And in each of those cases above – just because you can doesn’t mean you should.