Posts Tagged ‘Kanab’

The 25th Anniversary Tour

Coyote Butte North in the IR

Yeah, so it’s 25 years for the scruffy dude and the princess…  At some point you might just assume that you found the right person (or they found you), but it would not be a good idea to take it too lightly.  Here’s the acid test…  In the discussion of the location of the celebratory tour, I made the following suggestions – Alaska, Cairo (okay, maybe I threw that one in for myself), Hawaii, Polynesia, Paris & Rome.  Where duyawanna go?  ‘Somewhere south’, sez the HP.  ‘Eh?’  ‘Hawaii then?’, sez me.  ‘No, just somewhere nice in southern Utah’.  Yep, I married up with the right gal.

The Road to The Wave

We decided to visit the Arizona Strip; which is the lovely region along Highway 89 between Kanab, UT and Page, AZ.  The HP booked a couple of nights in Kanab and we were on our way.  On August 25 – the official anniversary date – we slept in a little and then made a leisurely drive to the Wire Pass Trailhead.  By the time we got going it was near noon – the perfect time of day for IR photography.  The series of images in this entry were recorded on our exploratory hike to check out the route to the Wave (covered in a future entry).  Whether or not you have a permit to entry The Wave proper, I can certainly recommend the hike – a uniquely spectacular route over sandstone ramps with only a little sand.

The TeepeesThe formation lying along the horizon in the image above is known simply as The Teepees.  They are outside of the special permit zones and may be visited at will.  The characteristic pyramidal shape of The Teepees  is typical of the Coyote Buttes geology.

I don’t usually include people in IR images, but shot the image below anyway, thinking that the HP was looking particularly lovely in the near-IR.  I was quite right, and I’m certain you’ll agree.

The HP is in the Buttes!The images in this post were recorded at around noon on August 15, 2009, using a Nikon D200 converted to IR capture – see the March 6, 2009 entry for more details.

Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park

Coral Pink Sand DunesTucked into the southwest corner of Utah, not far from Kanab, is a beautiful little state park with a big name: Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park.  This image exposes both what’s best about the park – awesome late afternoon light and excellent distant scenery, and what’s not so great – footprints and dune buggy tracks everywhere.  It’s a well-used park, that’s the balance…  The color coral has the sRGB designation of (255,127,80), pink is defined as (255,192,203) , and even coral pink has an sRGB definition, which is (255, 131, 121).  Anyway, the idea is a hue between orange and pale red.  I doubted that there could be sand of such a color, but  it is in fact exactly the right description.  The sand here is derived principally from Navajo Sandstone, which presents itself in a wide variety of hues, from pink to sun-bleached white.  The apparent color of the sand is highly sensitive to the color of the dominant light, and thus varies significantly according to the intensity and character of the ambient illumination.

The image above, looking south, was recorded on August 24, 2009, at 18:30 MST, using the Nikon D700 and the AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED lens at 24mm.  Exposure was f/16 at 1/160s – note that this is 2/3 stop underexposed, which is pretty standard for Nikon systems in brightish light conditions – all of my desert photography is exposure-bracketed, and the images recorded using 2/3 stop of underexposure are consistently the winners of the bracketed sets.

Coral Pink Sand Dunes North

The image above, looking north now, was recorded on August 24, 2009, at 19:30 MST, using the Nikon D700 and the AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED lens at 29mm(?).  Exposure was f/16 at 1/60s .  I believe this image captures the essential ‘coralness’ of the site – note that the color balance was set right off of the WhiBal, and that no there was no adjust of hue.

And of course, let’s not miss the opportunity to include a shot of the HP (below), who although it is not included explicitly in this entry, stood in for a number of color balance verification shots.

The HP at  CPSDSP