Irish Canyon, as with many canyons, is difficult to photography at sunset since the canyon goes into shadow well before the best sunset light.
The image above illustrates this problem. There is good sunset light on the top of the east canyon wall, but the rest of the canyon is already in shadow. If not for editing software, it would be very difficult to get much detail in the shadow, even with a graduated neutral density filter. Of course, one could make a composite of multiple exposures either by stacking the images or creating an HDR. Stacking can be tedious and HDR methods have another set of problems, so I prefer to avoid both of these methods, whenever possible.
Near sunset the canyon features went completely into shadows very quickly, not allowing much time to get the golden sunset light on much of the canyon.
One can see in the above image that the sun is still well above the horizon, but the canyon is already in deep shadow.
I worked my way along the roadway through the canyon, using the road as a leading line and capturing whatever features I could in the sky and the canyon walls.
Eventually, I got back to the old dead tree that I had found earlier in the afternoon, hoping that I could get a good, late day composition.
The clouds were moving overhead fairly quickly, changing as the sun went lower into the sky behind the west canyon wall.
I moved around a little, slightly changing my composition of the tree, canyon walls and clouds, making a number of images to capture the changing clouds and light.
Eventually, the interesting light was essentially gone and I stopped shooting for the day.
I believe I was right about this dead tree making a good foreground for sunset images.
My son set his camera up to shoot throughout the night at a big boulder to capture the moon’s transit and the varying light as the moon moved across the night sky. I elected not to try shooting night shots. I’m still reluctant to leave my camera unattended at night (although, I do sometimes), even in the wilds, and here we were not far from a road that was good enough that semi-truck rigs came through. There can also be animals, like deer, roaming around at night that could stumble over the camera.
Reminder: Click on the photos to view them on Flickr, where they will look much better.
On to the Gates of Lodore tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Ken