Sunset, Bryce Canyon Nat'l Park, Utah

This is sunset from the lip of the rim, Bryce Canyon National Park,

Utah, U.S.A., high in the Wasatch, Mountain Range. The park is a

giant canyon which highlights weathered columns called 'hoodoos' of

limestone which simply endure longer than the limestone around them

because of a protective coating of different minerals -- red color

caused by traces of iron turned into rust by exposure to oxygen in

the air. Your ratings and critiques are invited and very welcome.

If you rate harshly or very critically, please submit a helpful and

constructive comment/Please share your superior knowledge to help

improve my photography. (This is a fisheye view). Thanks! Enjoy!

John

The fisheye isn't working for me here. Due to the composition there isn't enough distortion to give the full "fisheye feel" which leaves me feeling like it's a nice landscape that's "off" in some way. I'm no expert on fisheye lenses, but I believe that most of the compositions that I've seen with them that work are those with strong foreground elements in the picture, and often long vertical elements near the edge that seem to wrap into the picture. I'd love to see a asperical version of this shot, because the colors seem fanstastic. You've really captured the alpenglow in the clouds.

This wasn't meant to be an exposition of the strength of a 'fisheye' lens -- even saying it was a 'fisheye' was almost an afterthought.

 

The sky 'alpenglow' was the result of the setting sun behind me over mountains and reflected down onto the canyon below by those thin clouds. This version was only possible by using shadow/highlight filter to bring what appeared black in the canyon 'out' by using the shadow portion of the filter to illuminate the canyon features.

 

And the cloud features were so subtle and so removed from each other anything other than a super wide angle would not have caught the scene -- in fact anything other than a fisheye could not have captured this scene at all, so I was stuck. It was a 'fisheye' or nothing.

 

Interestingly, with both my D2X and D200s, they autofocused on canyon features my eyes could not make out; as here I could not even see the canyon features I was photographing. Such autofocus power. This fisheye is f2.8, but the same worked for a f5.6 lens, although it 'hunted' a bit.

 

I am continually experimenting and posting different and unexpected photos on Photo.net; if you look at my work, for many photos they're entirely unique and I have a HUGE variety within my work, as I almost refuse to take the same photo twice or the same view twice (portraits excepted).

 

This is part of that experimentation. Not every photo can be a winner, but I felt it was deserving enough to post, and its ratings were decent enough; in fact if I hadn't said 'this is a fisheye' you might have felt differently about it, I think . . . . am I right?.

 

Thanks for letting me know your thoughts; they're valuable to me.

 

John (Crosley)