I wanted to reshoot at the Conversing Hoodoos at sunset, since I was not satisfied with the wide angle images made upon my first shoot here. Today I would use the 24-70mm lens, hoping the zoom range would let me be more discriminating with my compositions.
Daniel accompanied me for this shoot. We arrive early as I prefer to do, giving me time to shoot around the area at anything I see of interest, before moving to the primary subject.
There were many clouds in the sky, definitely adding interest to the sky, but maybe not good for sunset light.
The overcast sky with muted light made for good monochrome images. The Clam Hoodoo was just down a canyon/wash from the Conversing Hoodoos, so it was easy to shoot there prior to the sunset light.
In fact I think this turned out to be a really good late afternoon to find monochrome compositions with the many rock shapes and cloudy sky.
This particular hoodoo with the broad flat area and a pointy beak like part reminded me of a bird in flight. Looking closely one can even see an “eye” and a crease for a mouth. The embedded link is to the color version on Flickr.
This is my favorite monochrome image made this afternoon. I like the leading line of the sunlit rocks running diagonally, pointing to the highlighted rocks on the hillside, then the wash leading back to the upper center and the cloudy sky. I think this might even be the best image that I got in this shoot; although, I have not gotten any comments or faves on the posting to Flickr. So maybe readers will tell me if they see faults with this image. I think this image looks really good on my large iMac monitor. Maybe it does not look good viewed on smaller screens?
One never knows what kind of surprise one may find in this wilderness. Why and how is there a bicycle frame here? A totally surprising find.
I had previously taken a few iPhone shots of the “modern art like sculpture” in this image, while scouting here. Today I made a number of images of the two foreground rocks with the background hillside then focus stacked them using Helicon software before converting to monochrome.
As I had feared, the clouds on the western horizon prohibited any golden hour light this evening, so I had to make do with mostly silhouette type images of the Conversing Hoodoos with some sunset color on the horizon.
I made one HDR image from a few of the images to at least get detail in the foreground rocks.
The results of this attempt at sunset shooting here dictates another effort on another day. Such is the life of a landscape photographer.
Thanks for following,
Ken