Robert H Clark Photography Blog

Storm Light over the Grand Canyon, Lipan Point, South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Shot with a Sony a900 and a Zeiss 24-70mm lens at 30mm. Image exposed at ISO 100 at f16 for 3.0 seconds.

Hi everyone and welcome to today’s post. I spent today sorting through my Lightroom Library in an attempt to edit out images and open up some space on my hard drives. It is an interesting exercise that requires you to make some hard decisions and let go of images that don’t make the cut. Editing ones own work is difficult but you really have to take a hard line and keep only the best. Many times when I come back from a shoot I gravitate to the better images and work on those first. I start by rating the shots-5 stars for my real keepers and 3 stars for the “I’ll come back later shots”. The ones that don’t make one of the stars usually gets the ax. But not immediately. I keep them all for a while and return often to continue the judging process. Today’s image did not receive any stars on the first pass. I can’t say why except that there were stronger images that I worked on first. But on a revisit through the library I was attracted to the intense light and color in the clouds and thought I might have a go at processing the file.

The shot was made after the sun had set which can be a difficult scenario when shooting at the canyon. The reason is that light leaves the inner canyon rapidly as the sun moves lower to the horizon. This makes balancing an exposure a delicate proposition. You need a longer exposure to bring out inner canyon detail but you have to hold back the sky to prevent a blow out. When you have clouds such as these you can take advantage of the relighting effect that occurs after sunset. Light bouncing up into the clouds will reflect into the canyon and provide some subtle fill light that helps bring out some details. The addition of a Singh-Ray soft edge split neutral density filter will hold back the sky and help balance the exposure. Of course I could have made two exposures and blended in Photoshop but I prefer, if possible, to get the capture in one take. I adjusted the white balance on capture to 5500K to warm up the shot. Even so the blue light from the sky gave a blue cast to the shadows in the canyon. During RAW processing I knocked this out with the Blue Color Sliders in the HSL Color Panel in Lightroom. This was adjusted again in Photoshop to create the final color balance.

This shot was taken from Lipan Point on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. The butte in the foreground is part of the Escalante Butte. The white area along the Colorado River is Tanner Beach which sits along the Tanner Canyon Rapids. I’m glad this one did not hit the cutting room floor.

Thanks for stopping by today.

Bob