The third image in my Page, Arizona series is another image taken at Horseshoe Bend, but from a different perspective. I have no idea what kind of bush or tree this is growing out of the rock near the edge of the canyon, but when I realized the rising sun was about to cast a beam along the right edge of the white spine-like branches, I quickly put the camera and tripod in position to record the event.
This kind of image is known as a “near-far” composition. Find an interesting scene with an object in the foreground and fill the width of the camera frame with the object, letting the background and compositional “weight” of the foreground object draw the viewer’s eye to it. In this scene, the area of greatest contrast, the bright reflection of the sun-lit rocks in the river in the background, initially draws the eye of the viewer. The s-bend of the river and bottom-heavy composition of the image then draws the eye down the image to the tree. I purposely left some rock to the right and left of the tree to prevent the branches from “breaking” the frame and drawing the viewer’s eye out of the image. Hopefully I’ve succeeded.
As with last week’s Horseshoe Bend image, this one is also a composite of four exposures to have detail from the bright sky all the way into the shadows of the canyon.
While shooting the exposures for the above image, I got to really like the contrast of the colors around that island in the river. The golds of the reflected light from the rocks and the deep blues of the sky’s reflection really attracted me. With my Canon 5D with the 16-35 lens on the tripod to photograph the tree, I grabbed my 40D with a 70-200 lens to capture a detail of the river scene. This image was made using a single exposure since I was hand-holding the camera and lens (which makes accurately stacking multiple exposures very difficult).