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I was quite excited about this last day of our trip because the best photo opportunities all land on today. When I wrote this post, I had to pull my hair out choosing what photos to post because there are so many good ones! 😀

After grabbing complimentary breakfast (muffins) from the Super 8 Motel just before 9am, we headed out to the local Walmart down the street and grabbed water and Gatorade, and drove 5 minutes down the road to Horseshoe Bend. The parking lot was quite empty and we did a 1 mile hike towards the lookout point for the bend – again, it had a superb view of the river below making a horseshoe bend. I had my 24-105 on my camera and contemplated switching to my 17-50, but figured even at 17mm it wasn’t wide enough to capture the beauty of the entire bend, so I left it up to my friend’s D700 (FF) and 20mm prime to do the wide angle work. The lookout point was really steep into the valley and we did not have much room, so we went out to quite some adventurous spots to get good photos. The problem is the sun was behind us and the photographer’s shadow kept getting into the photo (due to the wide angle). We were already running late for our next appointment so we took whatever photos we could and headed off. In the end, this set of photos didn’t turn out that great so I won’t post them here.

We booked a 10am appointment with Antelope Canyon tours for a photography tour (which costs extra, for a total of $50 per person) and it was well worth the money. Antelope Canyon isn’t part of the national park systems, and while it is open to public, you generally can’t get to it without a tour since to get to the entrance you’ll need to do a 2+ mile (one way) hike in the sand, which is very difficult. Also, there are flash floods that happen through the canyon every year in the fall time (and that’s partly how it gets its beauty) so it is much safer to go with a tour guide as they will receive reports of it in advance and evacuate everyone. Our tour guide and the 5 of us hoped into a van that can switch to AWD so we can get past the sandy part to the mouth of the canyon.

The canyon is much narrower than I expected and it was actually quite crowded. When I did my research beforehand (for photos), I was expecting it to be quite deserted and I can have the canyon to myself :). There were multiple tours going on (normal and photography tours) and we were all fighting for the best spots (and everyone has their tripods as well!). One of the tricks that I read online was to throw up sand from the canyon floor into the light to accentuate the light in the photo. Apparently this “trick” is very well read and everyone is throwing sand up into the air – some tour guides even brought scoops to throw sand up into the light! At this point I totally regret not bringing a hat – not so much to cover my head but to cover my camera so the sand doesn’t mess up my lens! The sand is quite fine and one of my friends told me that’s how one of her lenses got messed up when she was in Peru. (Granted I had my 24-105 L lens on and I had some faith in its weather seal – and I don’t know what Nikon lens she messed up in Peru – though I don’t exactly want to risk it either). Within our group we have 3 big photographers (I guess just by value of gear) and we agreed to use different ranges to capture what we can and share our photos afterward. We had a wide angle D700 @ 20mm, a D300 @ 17-55mm (x 1.5 crop) and my 40D @ 24-105 (x 1.6 crop). This really worked out in the end ‘cuz we ended up with 3 very different set of photos – mine are more abstract (esp. since I opted for the long captures like 6s), the Nikon’s had the wide angle that captured how the canyon looked like. Also, I’ve became quite thick skinned behind my camera that I was willing to fight my way into the best position to capture the best shot 🙂 (which included going on my knees on the sandy floor for a good 15 minutes, resulting in a few scratches).

There really are too many photos worthy of posting – sorry for the many shots stretching this post (and the blog). Now where do I begin… let’s start with the storytelling ones first.
The canyon is very photogenic because of the way rays of light come down and bounces off the canyon walls, resulting in different colours. Tripod is a must here. Here’s me shooting with my 40D, and a D700 on a tripod to the right. Shot with a D300, 17mm (x1.5).

You can see how the light rays just comes from the openings at the top of the canyon behind me in this next one. D700, 20mm, f/4, 1/400s.

And here’s the money shot of me! All of us were posing in front of this light ray and there is actually a big crowd of people behind us trying to capture this ray as well, and some tour guide got mad and yelled at us saying “no more posing photos”, haha. D700, 20mm, f/4, 1/125s.

The canyon itself is actually quite narrow, and with vans and vans of tourists coming in (all holding cameras) it can get quite crowded, especially towards later on in the day. Here’s a photo I took of my friend and her Manfrotto tripod in action. The canyon is actually quite dark (hence the light rays stand out), so this is probably shot at ISO 3200.

Now to the more artistic shots. Here’s what the entryway of the canyon looks like – its nicknamed “candlestick” – hopefully the reasoning for that nickname is obvious from the photo. 40D, 28mm (x1.6), f/4, 1/50s.

Natural Lighting of the canyon. D300, 20mm (x1.5), f/4, 1/45s.

The light changes colours on the wall, creating a blue hue. D300, 22mm (x1.5), f/4, 1/20s.

Sand actually comes down naturally from the top of the canyon, creating a nice waterfall feel if the light happens to shine on it. 40D, 24mm (x1.6), f/5.6, 1/125s.

More rays lighting up the canyon. The canyon walls have smooth horizontal lines across them because they are created by the flash floods that occur a few times each year, and over time different water levels from the floods leave different markings on the canyon walls. D300, 18mm (x1.5), f/4.8, 1/125s.

Wide angle shot of the canyon. This is taken earlier on in the day when it is less crowded – I think there were at least 7 tours (average of 10 people each) crowding in the canyon by the time we left. D700, 20mm, f/5.6, 1/40s.

I love this wide angle shot towards the light my friend took – very cool in an abstract sense. D700, 20mm, f/4, 1s.

Some parallel rays going through the canyon towards the middle of the day (12:30PM or so). 40D, 24mm (x1.6), f/5, 1/13s.

Smooth curves created by the floods on the canyon walls. 40D, 24mm (x1.6), f/18, 2.5s.

I oddly like this photo with the balance between the positive and negative space, and how the wall’s curves feel very flow-y even though it is just a wall. 40D, 105mm (x1.6), f/22, 1.6s.

My own rendition of the shot towards the skylight. This is shot later (towards noon) and the canyon is lit up a lot more already. 40D, 24mm (x1.6), f/20, 3.2s.

Another shot showing the different colours of the light as well as the smooth contours on the wall that makes it seem so active. 40D, 35mm (x1.6), f/14, 6s.

Last but not least – the best and worst subject you can find for photos – kids! These shots were SO difficult to catch since the kid runs around (not really posing for me) and I had my settings on like f/20,6s,ISO100 to capture the light when the kid ran in – had to jack up the ISO quickly and switch to a faster shutter speed to capture our subject. Thumbs up to his parents for dressing him in red that day :). 40D, 24mm (x1.6), f/4, 1/100s.

And one more of the kid … praying! I think he was trying to imitate us when we were posing under the light :). 40D, 28mm (x1.6), f/4, 1/400s.

(sidenote: I was listening to “Only You Remain” by Mercy Me (in their latest Generous Mr. Lovewell album) while choosing photos, and the lyrics just reminded me of how awesome and powerful God is looking at these photos – Every mountain standing tall crash into the sea, You were, You are, You will be, only You remain…)

After going through 2 passes of the canyon to capture the different light spots (which changes as the sun moves), we took the van back out and concluded our $50 photographic tour. It was 1pm and someone suggested we go to Sonic for lunch – Sonic is yet another fastfood joint that is very popular in Texas, and you get to order through a drive through like stand and the waitresses will deliver food to your car on roller blades :). The Texans in our car guided our order (we 3 Canadians have no idea what was good) – and if you ever order from Sonic, make sure you try their strawberry limeade – specifically the order is “Route 44 (which means XL) Strawberry Limeade with extra strawberries and hold the ice” (after the first Texan made that order, everyone in the car was like… yeah I will have that drink as well”).

After grabbing lunch, our wide angle D700 guy wanted to go back to Horseshoe Bend to capture better photos with better lighting, except nobody would go with him – except for me! I’m always up for getting good photos. So we drove back to Horseshoe Bend (which was only 5 minutes away) and the 3 of them ate their fast food in the car (the same 3 that didn’t go to Angel’s Landing :P) and my friend and I hiked back up to the Horseshoe Bend to capture better photos. The sun was in a much better position and the river was actually clearer looking. We spent our time trying out different angles and here are some shots (you didn’t think I’d try to describe how beautiful Horseshoe Bend is without showing you photos did you? :P)

It should be obvious from the photo how the place got its name :). Obviously shot with the D700 – only a FF at 20mm can capture this – none of our crops were wide enough.

The lookout point was quite high up – as you can see. More sitting at the edge of the cliff photos :).

Another at the cliff photo. In hindsight I should have sat out further towards the tip of the rock, but this really was quite scary already.

And how can we not conclude with a nice pano. Shot with my 40D obviously – since the sky is insanely blue.

We took our sweet time at Horsehose Bend, which turned out to be slightly problematic as we underestimated the time it took to drive back by at least an hour. We began our drive back to Vegas at around 3pm, and the GPS is telling us that we’ll arrive at 7:09pm, when we all thought it only took 3 hours. We were in a time crunch because we previously found “free” tickets to the show “The Mentalist” which starts at 7:30pm, but the coupon says to show up to claim your tickets at the box office 1 hour before the show starts. (We would have watched another Cirque show if available, but apparently none of them shows on Mondays and Tuesdays – guess that’s the weekend for them). We traveled back to the state of Nevada and arrived at Las Vegas just after 7pm. 3 of us got dropped off at Planet Hollywood (where the show was) while the other two went to park the car. After racing through the Mile Long Mall (or something like that) to find the V Theater, we managed to get 5 “free” tickets to the show at 7:15pm. And I say “free” because the tickets, which apparently costs $55 a person, is “free” with the purchase of a drink that costs $9.95 and service charge of $6 or so, and so in reality it was $15 per person for the show + a drink.

“The Mentalist” is a magic show where the guy (Gerry something) does a bunch of magic tricks that involves the audience. (He apparently has his own show on CBS right now, I think). He was quite entertaining despite all of us feeling somewhat tired from the long day of activities. We originally thought a waitress would come by to take our drink orders during the show, but since nobody showed up we ended up stopping by the bar after the show to get our drinks – and we all ended up ordering shots. With a generous bartender our shots were in huge plastic cups and were at least worth 2 shots. So I had at least a double shot of bourbon and feeling quite warm, we left to get our car.

So the other 2 guys that went to park the car apparently left it for valet at Paris even though we don’t live there :P. We’re getting quite familiar with how the vegas system works – and at around 9pm we are going to execute our ultimate plan of using the vegas hotel systems! After a day of hiking (primarily its the sand from the canyon), we really wanted a shower, but we didn’t book a hotel room for the night since our flight left early in the morning (at 7am). So how do we get a shower in Vegas? We drove back to The Venetian, where we stayed the first night, and we took out our card keys which we did not return (don’t need to for quick checkout). Obviously the card keys are disabled now, but having a physical card key will help us get by the first security checkpoint (where we need to flash our card key to a security guard) to get access to the hotel towers. So we packed our clothes and toiletries into 2 backpacks and nonchalantly went into the hotel elevators. We found our way to the swimming pool and found the changing rooms, which conveniently has 1 shower :). I grabbed towels for everyone by the poolside and all of us took turns showering before the pool closed at 10pm.

After our sneaky showers, we went to Caesar’s Palace to grab dinner at Serendipity’s, which closes at 11pm. We were definitely the last table to order dinner, and sadly we were a little full (and tired) after dinner to order dessert – I even ordered an espresso shot to help me stay up the entire night. It was just before midnight when we left and decided we wanted to check out some nightclubs at Vegas. The best clubs in the US are apparently at NYC, Vegas and LA, so the nightclubs was definitely something worthwhile to see, even though we suspected on a Monday night, it would be quite empty. One guy wanted to go to the “nicer” nightclubs, but we vetoed the idea because “nicer” clubs have like a minimum spending requirement of $300/person :|. We checked other nightclubs that were open on Mondays and found Jet (at the Mirage) was open and it had a “reasonable” cover of $65 for guys and $35 for girls (I guess “reasonable” for Vegas). To our dismay, there was a super long line that wasn’t really moving at Jet, (who knew so many people would party on a Monday night?!) so we abandoned the nightclub idea and went back to the Venetian casino where we spent more money on our favorite Star Trek slot machine :).

The rest of the night was a blur after that – partly because I had a few more drinks (combo-ed with the espresso at dinner) at the casino and we were trying to kill time playing the star trek slot machine and some pai gow poker as well. We ended up leaving the Venetian and went to Bellagio’s self-parking garage, and started re-packing our luggage and changing out of our clubbing clothes. At one point we had all our luggage laid out on the floor of the parking lot and the hotel security came by to check if we were OK. We then loitered a bit in Bellagio through their floral exhibit and their casino floor, and found ourselves back at the garage and we decided to head to the airport at around 4am. We had one bag to check-in so we waited at the airport for the airline counter to open, and the rest was rather uneventful as we slept for most of the time until we arrived back at Seattle.

That’s my mid-US trip in April/May. I’ll be making another trip to Yellowstone towards the end of May – I’ll blog about it then!

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A great time was had by all of TPX! Keep the good times rolling!

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continued…

After grabbing lunch at Subway, we hurried off towards Arches National Park, without stopping to replenish our water supply, which proves to be a problem later on. During our 4 hour drive, we entertained ourselves with puzzles and “what happened?” scenario games – basically someone proposes a scenario like “A naked man is found dead in the middle of a field holding onto a straw, what happened?” and the players can ask Yes or No questions to find out what happened. (This becomes important later on) The drive was quite scenic and we arrived at Arches National Park at around 5:45pm.

After visiting the visitor’s center and talking to the park ranger, we followed his recommendation and went to visit some easy spots first.
This is “Balanced Rock” – a ball of rock resting on a stone structure. Wonder how many years it’ll take before the ball collapses.

Side view of Balanced Rock – you can see how thin the supporting point is.

We then went to “The Windows”, which is a series of arches. This one even has a hole in the wall.

Double Arches at South Window:

The Big Arch at South Window:

Reminded me of the arch we saw at St. Louis during Urbana ’06.

At around 6:45pm, we arrived at the trail head towards Delicate Arch, which is a free-standing arch that got us on this entire trip in the first place. (One of the organizers saw the arch in a photo, started planning the trip but decided to drop Arches National Park altogether because it was slightly out of the way and arches didn’t seem THAT impressive… yet here we are in the end). It was another long hike with a lot of elevation gain :S, but what made this hike more fun was the 2nd half of the trail wasn’t paved and only had sparse trail markers.

The sun was low in the sky by the time we started, creating some pretty lights against the clouds in the sky.

Sunset was due to occur at 8:10pm that day, and the ranger estimated 1.5 hours to get up to the top, so we hurried up the trail, hoping to arrive in time to capture sunset at the Delicate Arch. We wandered through some beautiful landscape (and it felt all the more adventurous without a clearly defined trail) and got to the Delicate Arch at 7:45pm or so – just before sunset.

We wandered through some pot like rock formation:

and the 2nd half of the trail was not paved and is only marked by trail markers like these:

After some elevation gain we got to a very “wilderness” section of the trail – it definitely felt different from hiking on a paved trail.

And we found an oasis in the middle of the wilderness.

And finally, Delicate Arch – a free standing arch, quite different from the ones at South Window.
From a different angle, Delicate Arch is at the edge of a bowl shaped structure with a steep drop on both sides.

We found plenty of other photographers camping out around Delicate Arch for a good sunset shot when the sun would cast its golden rays on the Delicate Arch stone structure – but unfortunately the clouds were in the way and the direction of the sun’s rays weren’t right, so we never saw the fading sun over the Delicate Arch. We did, however, see a beautiful sunset in general.

The sunset light can be seen on the mountains in the backdrop, but missed the arch itself.

Sunset lighting the clouds up as if they are on fire.

We left Delicate Arch just before sundown so we can avoid hiking back down the mountain in darkness. We got back to the car at around 9:00pm and we still have a 4 hour drive to our next stop for the night at Page, AZ. We continued to pass time and combat sleepiness with our “What happened?” scenario games, involving a wide variety of strange scenes with people dying from falling, suffocating, amputation etc., when the scariest event of the day happened.

Since Garmin said our ETA was close to 2AM, we decided to grab a quick bite at Wendy’s and keep pressing towards our hotel for the night. We switched drivers at Wendy’s and that’s when the chain of events began to unfold. Our new driver was complaining throughout the day how there wasn’t enough wildlife throughout Utah, and he wanted to see like flocks of bison in the wild or something. Well, his wish was granted as he made a turn onto a rural road and he screamed “Oh my god, what the f***” and slammed on the brakes. After all the screaming in the car subsided, we saw 3 donkeys taking their sweet time crossing the road ahead of us. After our close call with the donkey, we were more alert for wild animals, until we started playing more “what happened” games where we were investigating how a human arm ended up in a mailbox, and suddenly the driver screamed and braked again as deers crossed right in front of us. After these two close calls, more eyes were on the road ahead of us… only to observe more strange things.

With murder by suffocation and amputation on our minds, we came across an old car abandoned at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, which we thought was rather strange and bizarre. We continued down “Main Street” (which really is a rural road with a speed limit of 65mph (110km/h or so)) and after following a gentle curve, our headlights shone on a man in a checkered hoddie with his thumb held up. We were quite shocked at the sight of a hitchhiker in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road as questions raced through our minds – what was he doing there at close to 1AM in the morning? Someone suggested it was a setup where if we stopped, the hitchhiker’s crew hiding in the fields would come out and jump us; someone even suggested he was a ghost hitchhiker :|. In any case, our car was full so we couldn’t have stopped, but we thought the most plausible scenario was the guy’s car broke down and he was walking towards the next town when we drove by. We decided to find the nearest mile marker and use our cell phones to call 911 in case the hitchhiker really needed assistance (or if it really was a crime setup). Unfortunately, our cell phones did not have reception since we are in the middle of nowhere – so we went on with our imaginations running wild as to ‘what happened?’.

We are approximately 20 minutes away from Page when we crossed the train tracks and again, braked abruptly to avoid hitting a wild dark horse crossing the road :|. None of the passengers saw what we were stopping for, but good thing our driver was alert and apparently saw the reflection of the horse’s eyes. Having quite enough wild animals for the day, we arrived at the Super 8 Motel and checked in around 2AM.

When we passed the state line from Utah to Arizona, I pointed out that there’s a possibility of timezone difference between UT and AZ. Strictly speaking, UT and AZ are on the same time zone (MST), but from my studies at ASU, I found out AZ does not observe daylight savings, but unfortunately I do not know if this is the time of the year where UT and AZ are in sync or out of sync. When we got to our hotel rooms, we found out that AZ is actually out of sync with UT right now and to our pleasant surprise, it is actually 1 hour behind, meaning it is only 1AM-ish and we get an extra hour of sleep :).

At this point we are completely out of water and Gatorade and I ended up drinking Arizona tap water from a small town 😐 and vowing to stop by Walmart first thing in the morning.

P. S. Day 3 may take a while because the best photos of the trip are from Day 3 – and I have double the amount of shots to process through 😛

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Warning: this video will be extremely boring to non dog-lovers :p It’s not much more than typical Burton behaviour. View it in YouTube to be able to read the annotations.

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We had an eventful Day 2 so I’m splitting it up into 2 parts.

We woke up at around 9am (which is late) and to our dismay, everything was snow covered outside and it felt like Canadian weather again. Many of us were definitely unprepared for the cold weather, including myself (I didn’t have room to pack a winter jacket, and for some strange reason I brought a scarf but not a hat or gloves :S). We stopped by a nearby Subway for breakfast, and conveniently they also have free wi-fi. After grabbing a bite, we went to the Bryce Canyon National Park Visitor Center. The ranger told us the snowstorm didn’t hit very hard last night so the roads are pretty clear, and as the sun goes up most of the snow on the roads should melt.

Bryce Canyon is famous for its hoodoos (the spire shaped rock formations) – hoodoos are most abundant in the world in Bryce Canyon National Park. We followed the ranger’s recommendations and visited Bryce Point first while we still have morning light. The view was, once again, amazing – I had time to stitch some panos 🙂 Unfortunately the downside is it was freezing cold, with wind chill at around 15 mph I think (here I go with Imperial again). The good part is most of the viewpoints at Bryce Canyon were “drive by” viewpoints – you basically drive up to the spot and there’s almost no hiking necessary to get to the lookout points. We visited a handful of viewpoints including:

Here’s what hoodoos look like:

Another shot of hoodoos. Note the snow – it was quite cold!

Shots like these show why Bryce Canyon National Park has the most hoodoos in the world.

Hoodoos against a mountain. Me looking.

An interesting natural “castle” like structure. Notice the cave.

Full shot of this natural castle.

Another side of the castle with funny walls sticking out.

Natural hole in the wall. (think they called it Natural Bridge – no it is not accessible)

And some pano shots! From Bryce Point:

Pano from inspiration point:

And as an interesting exercise, here are 2 pano shots from nearly the same place, one at 20mm FF and one at 24mm x1.6 crop.

So by noon or so, we’re done with all the drive-by viewpoints. At this point we could opt to take a hike in Bryce Canyon, or the more crazy idea floated around is to take a detour to visit Arches National Park, which is a detour of 4 hours one way – and we opted for this detour. So we quickly went back to the Subway to grab a foot long sub to go for lunch, and then hopped into the car for a 4 hour drive North-East into Utah for Arches National Park (which was close to Colorado, almost making this a 4 state trip)…

(to be continued!)

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