I visited Lower Antelope Canyon over six weeks ago and still hadn’t posted more than a few images. There are two reasons for this: I took a lot of images and each requires a fair amount of processing. Light in the canyon varies significantly so I took 3-5 images of each shot at different exposures to capture both shadows and highlight detail. The images needed to be combined in post (HDR merged), which takes a lot of time for more than 350 individual shots. I also needed to noise from high ISO images and leverage masking for optimal effect. In the end it took a lot of work to figure out which images I wanted and then process them in this way.
While they needed a lot of editing, I’m very proud of these. In a perfect world I would have been able to take my time and use a tripod, but I didn’t have that luxury. Thanks to modern software and AI capabilities I can make up for less-than-ideal conditions. These images are processed to be somewhere between natural and how they felt to me at the time. There are few that are intentionally processed in an “artsy” way, but the rest lean towards natural instead of fantasy. They may be a bit more punchy, shadowy, and saturated than they were in reality, but they’re still realistic.
I ended up with a significant number of keeper images because I found so much interesting texture throughout the canyon. There were often people on the pathway but I didn’t mind. I instead focused on subjects above the path or up toward the sky. There were plenty of striations, layers, dark and light contrasting areas, edges, and interesting openings to the outside to photograph. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the canyon and love these images. I’ll probably continue editing through them and finding unique textures and patterns I like.
I reprocessed some of them as black and white to bring out the details and contrast. These are pretty fun.
Relatively Ambitious 
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