Search This Blog

Angel's Landing and Zion Canyon Overlook

Posted
Angels Landing Zion National Park UTA few weekends ago I went back to Zion National Park in Utah with a couple of friends. It was my 4th visit to Zion, and in the past I have done some of the easier hikes as well as hiked the Virgin River up the "Narrows" slot canyon, so this time I was looking for something a little more "out there on the edge".

Nothing fits that bill more than the Angel's Landing hike which takes you 1500 ft (450m) above the canyon floor to the edge of vertical cliffs overlooking the canyon. The hike in itself is about 2.5 miles (4km) each way, but the last half mile is the most challenging as it is not only very steep, ascending almost 500 ft in that last half mile, but the trail is along the narrow razorback ridge that runs out to the spot called Angel's Landing. The point was named Angel's Landing, by the way, by Frederick Fisher who was said to exclaim while exploring Zion in 1916 that only an angel could land on the monolith.

Looking at the accompanying photo of Angel's Landing you don't get the impression that what you're looking at is a narrow fin of rock, but that is in fact what it is.

Our reading about the hike online scared us, not just because of the steep climb (our average age qualifying for being "of a certain age", and we all have sedentary jobs), but also because we were weren't sure how we'd do on those vertical edges. But we were up to at least giving it a shot and going as far as we comfortably could, and hopefully all the way.

Anyhow, you can read the story of the hike and whether I made to Angel's Landing or not along with the photos I've posted. You can also see some shots I took along the Zion Canyon Overlook trail that we hiked in the late afternoon.

Angel's Landing and Zion Canyon Overlook Gallery

Angel's Landing and Zion Canyon Overlook Slideshow

Subscribe

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Samoan Youth

Posted
This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm
Image

Adjusting Levels and Curves with Photoshop

Posted
When I was working with this photo of the sunset over the Grand Canyon last night, I realized that it was a perfect photo to demonstrate the power of the two quick Photoshop adjustments that improve almost any photo. They are adjusting the levels and curves. Almost all photos benefit from an adjustment to both of these elements. I opened the photo of the sunset which I shot using Canon's raw format (CR2). A "raw" file is actually not an image file; it's a data file that has to be opened with a program that can read it and process it as an image file. Photoshop has plug-ins for handling the raw files for all the common brands of cameras. Here's the before and after of the image: The original unadjusted photo has an orange cast. A lot of photos have casts, and especially wide-angle landscape photos. You can think of the cast as something like a colored mesh or filter over the entire surface of the photo. Adjusting levels will remove the color cast. So let's sta...
Image

Taking Photos in RAW DNG Format with Mobile Devices

Posted
Note: This post was originally published on January 16, 2017, as the second part of a three-part series on RAW format mobile photography. Some details — particularly the apps' feature sets, Android versions, and the state of mobile RAW photography — have changed considerably since then. I've left the original text in place as a record of where things stood at the time. Following on from yesterday's post ( What is RAW photography format? ), today I am going to share with you some ways you can take RAW DNG (digital negative) files using an Android device such as a smartphone or tablet. Currently I am using a Google Pixel XL smartphone running on Android 7.1.1 (Nougat). If you haven't yet read yesterday's post, I recommend that you take the time to do so to give you an understanding of the advantages of taking your photos in RAW format. Android Apps That Allow You to Take Photos in RAW Format Currently, these are the two apps I use on my Google Pixel XL ...
Image