Dad and I have returned from sunny Arizona with many images to go through and another great trip in the books.  The trip was filled with lots of scouting at mid day and lots of shooting in the mornings and evenings.  The lighting was amazing but also proved to be quite difficult to work with as there were lots of shadows and highlights on the rock.  This made obtaining proper exposure harder but it was still attainable.

As you can see from the first image in the post, one of the hardest images of the trip was a nightscape.  I told Dad days before the trip this was an image I was after and he was great every step of the way in being all about this shot.  We scouted for hours during the days trying to find the perfect spot compositionally and somehow luck would have it that the spot we found was actually quite close to town.  The shot was then split into 2 parts (1, foreground detail & 2, star trails).  I won’t go into the techniques used but all in all there was 4 hours of preparation, 4 hours scouting, 3 hours actually shooting, and 2 hours post-processing (13 hours total).  I would say that shooting at night will probably be an up-coming blog lesson after High ISO.

The most popular natural rock area around Sedona was Cathedral Rock.  Cathedral Rock is seen in most of the images from the Sedona area.  While we spent a couple sessions photographing in this area, we didn’t want the whole trip to be about this one spot so we did branch out quite a bit.

Another phenomenal area was Schnebly Hill Rd.   This very rugged dirt/rock road was 11 miles in length and simply driving it took just over an hour.  We found some great areas on this road during our scouting so 2 of our mornings were spent in spots along this road.

During our second morning of shooting on Schnebly Rd. we hiked out to a flat rock face to shoot from and enjoyed the sounds of Coyotes calling.  All in all, a great photography trip for us.  Stay close to the blog for Part II where some of Dad’s images will be show-cased.