5 PHOTO TIPS FOR SHOOTING ANTELOPE CANYON

The entrance to Upper Antelope Canyon.

Located about ten minutes outside Page, Ariz., Upper Antelope Canyon is one of those magnificent natural wonders that should be on every photographer's must shoot list.

An authorized Navajo tour guide is required to gain access and while there are a number of tour operations available in the Page area, I choose Roger Ekis' Antelope Canyon Tours and specifically signed up for the photographer's tour. Most of the tour operations offer some sort of a photography option which will cost you a little more money, but does give you more time on location, ensures that you can use a tripod, and most importantly, means you are with other photographers whose sole purpose is the same as yours.

This was my first and only visit to Upper Antelope Canyon and I spent a total of two hours taking photographs. I mention this because I don't want to give the impression that I know everything there is to know about photographing here. However, I think you will find these five tips useful if you ever get the opportunity.

Photographed with a 10.5mm lens and corrected in Adobe Lightroom 4.

1. Take your time. You've anticipated this shoot, have seen incredible images taken by others and know that you have limited time, so you can't wait to drop the tripod legs and begin shooting. In our case, we walked immediately to the back of the canyon where it is much shallower and more cave-like with less light reaching the canyon floor. We then proceeded to shot while working our way back to the entrance. Two hours doesn't seem like a long time, but you don't have to make all your images in the first ten minutes either. Also in this case, I think the better shots are closer to the entrance of the canyon where it is wider, brighter and the sunlight filtering down from 120' above brings out the most colors and patterns in the sandstone walls. So use your first half hour of time to get used to shooting in this environment and don't rush.

My guide tosses a handful of sand onto a ledge creating a nice visual effect as it then "flows" over the edge.

2. Cooperation and communication are key. You will be shooting alongside other photographers in addition to sharing the canyon with other tours so you need to be cognizant of that. Your guide can help by warning when other groups are approaching or maybe even assist with moving lingerers along, but mostly it will be up to you to plan, frame and execute your shot, then get out of the way for others. Again, don't rush and with four photographers in my group it never was a problem getting the shots that I wanted. Rely on your guides advice, they have been visiting this location for years, observing it in different light and at different times of the year and can quickly point out the best shots or locations. I know you want to discover a shot that has never been made before, but with the limited time, a little assistance goes a long way. It is still your photograph the moment you release the shutter. 

Detail pointed out by the guide is only seen by looking straight up. 

3. Environmental awareness. When looking at the photographs, they look bright and colorful as if there was a lot of available light. Don't be fooled, the average exposure time for all of these shots was 1/2 a second. It's not so dark that you can't see, but it is dark enough that focus can be an issue. In fact, it was the one thing I had the hardest time with. Other than a tripod, I highly recommend that you bring a flashlight to not only assist with setting up your camera but to shine on the walls in order to assist with focus. Again be aware and courteous to other photographers. I started off at ISO 200, but found that my exposure times were too long, especially when shooting two stops under while bracketing, so I ended up shooting mostly at ISO 400 and in some cases ISO 640. It does get brighter nearer the entrance and I was back at 400. 

Having the right equipment, including a tripod and remote shutter release, are essential.

4. Equipment. I went with a Nikon D3S attached to a Gitzo tripod and three lenses, the Nikon 10.5mm, Nikon 14-24mm and the Nikon 24-70mm. Most of the photos were shot using the 14-24mm and the 24-70mm. In my backpack, I also had a Nikon D700, Nikon 70-200mm VR, and an SB900 flash, but really should have left those in the car. My advice, bring the widest, fastest lens you own. The canyons are narrow and as mentioned before, there are other people moving by and you really want to concentrate on taking photos and not worrying about gear or lens selection. The floors of the canyon are covered in sand which gets stirred up as people and you move about, so be cautious if you change lenses and be sure to have a lens cloth handy. Lastly, I was using a pocket wizard plus to trigger my camera, but only because I didn't have a cable release. If you don't have a way to release the shutter remotely, use the self-timer. 

Three shot bracket taken at -1.0, 0.0 and +1.0. 

5. Take plenty of photographs at various focal lengths and multiple f-stops. Almost everything I shot during my two hours was bracketed by either three or five stops. Originally I thought I would process these photos using the high dynamic range or HDR technique, however, in the end none were. The bracketing was critical though when it came to selecting the best exposure to process. I would shoot the multiple exposures, check focus, then shoot another sequence.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, this was my first visit to the canyon so I only have this one brief experience photographing in the mid-December light. The look in this canyon will change depending on the time of year, so if you want to photograph shafts of light then you will need to visit during the summer months. Of course during the summer you will also contend with large crowds which would certainly add to the anxiety of getting the photographs you want.

In addition to Upper Antelope, there are other slot canyons in the area including, Lower Antelope, Canyon X or Cardiac Canyon. These locations are less frequented, meaning they are also less photographed, so would offer additional opportunities to produce never before seen images. Apparently some of these canyons do require hiking and more time, so they are not as accessible as Upper Antelope.

And don't forget to just stop, take the camera away from your eye and absorb the surroundings. As photographers we often get caught up in the scene and forget to just take a moment and enjoy what is around us. While we tell ourselves that we will have the photographs to remember it by, nothing compares to being there. More on this in a future post.

Additional tour companies to consider:

http://www.overlandcanyontours.com/

http://www.lowerantelope.com/

For more information on Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation visit http://www.navajonationparks.org/

PHOTOGRAPHY COPYRIGHT TUTORIAL

You hear it often. Copyright your photographs. However, it often ends there, with just the suggestion. So I decided I would record a tutorial on the process I go through to copyright images, in this case photographs from my recent trip to Arizona.

When discussing copyright and all the issues surrounding it, I think it is important to mention that I'm not a copyright lawyer or expert and only know what I've read or heard from those that are. I also see many message boards and comment sections that discuss copyright, however, I would avoid putting too much stock in those and instead just visit a site such as thecopyrightzone.com by Edward Greenberg and Jack Reznicki to get the facts.

This tutorial is in two parts. First, I go through my work flow of preparing the photos for upload and in the second part, I take you through the process of actually uploading the photographs to the U.S. Copyright Office.

Some things to keep in mind:

As the photographer you automatically own the copyright to the photograph unless you sign it away in writing. The one exception is if you are a full-time employee, then the employer owns the copyright as a "work made for hire."

Registration is required if you intend to file a lawsuit. If you registered you work before the infringement, or within three months of publication, then you can sue for statutory damages plus attorney fees.

Using © is no longer required, however you may still use it to clearly identify yourself as the copyright holder. How do I make that fancy © symbol? Option G on a Mac, Alt + 0169 on Windows and © in HTML.

While I don't copyright every photograph I take, I do when I intend to make the photographs commercially available or if I believe others may do the same without my permission.

Most of my photographs, even ones that I have previously copyrighted, are available through a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerives license. This allows others to download my photos and share them as long I'm given credit, but cannot alter them or use them commercially.

Additional resources:
Editorial Photographers web site.
Visit www.copyright.gov for a step-by-step tutorial

THREE INEXPENSIVE PHOTOGRAPHY ACCESSORIES TO CONSIDER

As photographers, we like to say it is all about the photograph and the art of making those photographs. And it is, but I also believe there is a little something in all of us, both professional and amateur, that likes new gear, gadgets, and software. We read blogs about it, discuss it over drinks or on assignment, and sometimes even long after it.

Well if you don't have thousands of dollars in your pocket, let me offer you three ways to satisfying the desire for some new gear without having to explain anything to your accountant, spouse, employer.

When was the last time you saw a lens keeper. Many of you probably don't even know what one looks like, and in fact, most professional photographers, and for that matter, most amateurs, wouldn't be caught dead using one. It is one of those accessories right up there with the Mickey Mouse camera strap that cause photographers to chuckle behind a colleague's back. However, when I purchased my Fujifilm X10, I found that I was always taking the lens cap off, putting it in my pocket, taking a photo, then digging in my pocket in order to replace the cap.

That's when I remembered this long ago forgotten gadget. And lo and behold it is still being sold. I picked mine up at Walmart for under $5.00 and it is the greatest thing. While it may not be practical for the lens cap on the 70-200mm, it is perfect for a compact camera.

I recently broke this 77mm filter yet the 24-70mm lens remained undamaged.

You can add filters to the front of your lens for all sorts of reasons, special effects, color tint, close-ups, neutral density or polarizing, but with the exception of a neutral density filter, I haven't added one of these filter since I started shooting digital in 1999.

I do, however, without exception, use a skylight, ultraviolet or clear glass filter to protect the front lens element from nicks and scratches. There has been a handful of occasions where I've smashed or broken one of these filters and yet there was no damage to the lens. This includes dropping a lens on concrete pavement. A good 77mm clear NC glass filter will run you about $89.00. Of course, you can find cheaper filters, but remember that the lens you are attaching them to probably cost around 20 times the cost of that filter. I do sometimes remove the filter when in the studio or some other safe environment. Think of this as really cheap insurance.

Manfrotto 175F1 spring grip clamp with attached flash shoe.  AKA, the Justin Clamp.

I shoot a fair amount of environmental portraits as part of my job and most of the time I get about five minutes to visit an office, figure out a good angle, get the shot and get out. Even though five minutes is not much time, I still like to use at least two off-camera strobes, perhaps even adding a gel to one of them, combined with ambient light to get the best natural portrait possible.

Plus, with such a short window of opportunity, I don't want to mess with light stands, umbrellas, reflectors or even a softbox. In these situations, I almost always turn to the Justin Clamp from Manfrotto.  This simple accessory will quickly become one of the most useful accessories in your portrait kit.

With one strobe attached to the flash shoe of the clamp, you can clip this to just about anything, from a door frame to a flat screen TV, and if there are removable ceiling tiles, it can be attached to the grid. And even if you don't use the clamp as intended, it acts as a very stable base so you to set the flash on a desk or atop a file cabinet. I then hand hold the second flash, trigger both with an SU 800 attached to the camera and am in and out in no time.

Now put away the credit card and treat yourself to a nice dinner with all the money you just saved.

Better yet, get out and make good pictures.

GRAB A LOUPE - A NEW YEAR WITH OLD NEGATIVES

Original photo taken in 1993 on Kodak TRI-X film.

This didn't start out to be the first blog post of 2013, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt that this is a perfect project to start the New Year. If you are a photographer of a certain age, you can relate to the thousands of negatives and slides that fill binders and boxes under my eaves. You remember those days don't you? You'd shoot roll after roll of film, have it processed and printed and in the end, file away all those negatives and maybe some 4x6 inch prints in shoe boxes or albums that rarely were opened or looked at again.

When I purchased my first negative scanner in 1994, I would have the color film processed and sleeved, then spend hours at the computer scanning selected frames. Many of those scanned images still live on old hard drives or Zip disks and are not of the highest resolution.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, because if you really are a photographer of a certain age, you shot black and white film, processed it in the darkroom, made contact sheets and then spent many more hours printing and spotting.

So this brings us to the digital age where you can - with only a few pieces of gear you likely already own - dig out all those old negatives and slides and share them with the world, probably for the first time.

Equipment used: DSLR, macro lens, diffused light source, tripod and light stand(s), film holder, clamps and photo processing software.

Follow these few easy steps and techniques and you will think you are back in the darkroom, minus the smell of Dektol.

And staying with the darkroom theme, just think of the light source as the enlarger head, the film carrier would serve the same function and the camera replaces the easel which held the photographic paper.

For the light source I used a 36x36 inch softbox with a continuous light source inside. I then positioned the film about a foot in front and centered on the light. To hold the negatives/slides, I used old film holders from my no longer operational Minolta digital film scanner.

I attached the film holder to a clamp and bracket which were then attached to a light stand. I used an old manual 55mm Nikor Micro lens attached to a Nikon D3S and moved the camera in as close to the film holder as a could and still focus. I set the cameras ISO to 200, shutter speed to 800, f-stop at 11. I captured the images in the raw format using a custom white balance. Initially I bracketed a few stops on either side of f-11, but did not notice any significant difference.

I photographed black and white negatives, color negatives and transparencies and imported all of the images into Lightroom and processed as follows:

It's as simple as inverting the tone curve. Original photo 1994 on Kodak T-MAX 400.

In order to convert the black and white and color negatives into positives, you need to flip the tone curve as shown in the photo above. In the case of B&W negatives, once the curve is flipped you will find that the results are pretty close to perfect, especially if your original exposures were correct and the negatives have good density. I did make some fine adjustments to the shadows and highlights. In the case of color images it did take a little longer to adjust since sometimes the color shifted. I found the quickest way to get close with color negatives after flipping the tone curve was set a white and black point.

Original photo 1997 on Fujicolor Press 800 color negative film.

Since slide or transparency film is already a positive, you are done with the exception of some minor color corrections. You may have to open up the shadows and reduce the contrast a bit, but again with Lightroom or Photoshop this is a breeze.

Original photo shot in 1990 on a Kodachrome 200 transparency and cropped to retain the film holder.

This really was easy to do and I'm having a blast looking back and sharing images I made over 25 years ago. Probably the most time you will spend on this project is getting caught up in looking back through the years of images and the memories that are associated with them.

Keep a can of dust off handy as well, but spotting is a whole lot easier now using Photoshop or Lightroom.

A photo of my son from 1994 shot on Ilford HP5 Plus in our backyard that I had forgotten about.

A great tutorial along with many other scanning hardware options is available at www. shuta.org.

UPDATE: I copied a negative using my Fujifilm X10 compact camera and had acceptable results.

Photo taken behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Kodak  High-Speed Infrared film.

The setup was the same. Camera was set to manual with an ISO of 200, shutter speed of 400, and a f-stop of 5.6. I used the super macro setting on this camera which enabled me to get within inches of the negative. I noticed some distortion which was not present when using a DSLR, but otherwise the results were satisfactory.

ARIZONA - FINAL DAY

I woke when the alarm went off at 3:15 a.m. with the goal of doing more star photography. A quick check of the night sky showed no visible stars. I'd say I was disappointed, but crawling back into the warm bed made up for that. Got out of bed again at 4:30 a.m. and still no stars but it was snowing. This was even better. Back to bed again.

I was dressed and ready to shoot by 6 a.m., only problem was that visibility looked like it might only be 100 feet. At first light I still couldn't see anything so I decided to just have breakfast and wait it out, since I wasn't going to leave Monument Valley when there was a chance to capture some snow photos.

Yucca plant in Monument Valley.

Finally went out around 8 a.m. and while visibility was still limited, I was able to shoot some detail shots. For a brief moment I thought I would get a break when the bottom of Mitchell Butte was visible, but the fog quickly settled back in. After two hours I returned to the hotel, checked out and waited patiently in the lobby.

The fog clears to reveal Merrick Butte.

First glimpse of the Merrick Butte through the lobby window came around 11 a.m., so I grabbed my gear and quickly ran to get in position. Visibility came and went, first revealing most of Michell Butte, but want really caught my attention was when I started catching glimpses of just the top portion of the West Mitten.

West Mitten and East Mitten.

It was constant shooting for the next hour or so as the fog came and went and more of more of the valley came into view. As the wind picked up it wasn't long before most of the fog had cleared. I knew I had about a five hour drive ahead and figured it was about time I got on the road.

Mid December snow in Monument Valley.

During the drive south to Payson, Ariz., patches of blue began to appear in the sky and before I knew it there were these amazing cloud formations. I kept wanting to pull over and was desperately looking for something to put in the foreground. Finally I saw some interesting rock formations by the side of the road and thought they would make a good excuse to photograph the clouds. Those photos came out fine, but as I turned to head back to the car, I noticed the clouds that had been behind me were far more interesting, so I framed up a simple composition and made the final image of this trip.

Hope you enjoyed joining me on this photographic adventure as I talked about planning the trip, the gear I was bringing and the daily updates while on the road. Check back after the holidays for posts on my first time shooting the stars and what I learned photographing in Upper Antelope Canyon and more.