JTHphoto said:
amazing... where were these? are there slot canyons like these in more than one place? There are some in northern arizona that i want to go to soooooo bad. it sounds like a pain though, did you have to have a guide?
do you mind sharing any of your techniques? tripod, filters? exif? these are fantastic, especially the first 3. I am going to make it a point to get up there in the next year or so...
These were at the Upper Antelope Canyon near Page in Arizona. We had a Navajo guide on a "Photographer's Tour". You can't go there without a guide.
At times there were far too many people/tourists being shown around. I started off at ISO 100 and exposures were 25-30 seconds long, but people kept walking into the shots. I upped it to ISO 400 which worked better. I used an aperture of f/22 to start with, but again the exposure times were too long, so I lowered it fo f/11, which seems to have still kept a good depth of field.
I try to meter from the middle tones, but trying to keep some of the highlights from blowing out is tough. I did some bracketed exposures at the areas where the light and dark is to far apart for the CMOS sensor in the hope that I can combine them into an HDR image.
The only filter I used was a UV to keep the dust off the lens. It gets very dusty, so you need an air-blower. I would not recommend changing lenses in the canyon. I used a 17-40mm and it was pretty much perfect for every shot, so one lens should be enough.
Our tour guide was good at clearing the area of tourists for us to get photos and he also knew when the light beams would appear and where they would be. He also pointed out quite a few great locations for photos that were not immediately obvious.
The main problem is the tourists and their P&S cameras... When you're in the middle of a 15 second exposure, then they go and take a photo using the flash, it can obviousbly flatten ouf the tones. Luckily, it didn't effect my photos too much.
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