Click on the image for licensing terms
This is a view of Devil's Bridge arch, near Sedona in Arizona USA.
This time I was standing beneath the arch looking up, trying to convey the sheer scale of this amazing geological feature by including the odd tree to compare it with.
The details in the sandstone were particularly beautiful, and the underneath of the arch was lit by light reflecting from the valley floor below, giving an etheral glow to the rock.
All this sounds very prosaic, but trying to photograph it in a way that conveyed even some of the emotion I was feeling at the time was tricky to say the least.
The contrast range between the arch, the sky and the white limestone rock capping the butte in the distance was banging up against both exposure limits on my camera's sensor.
I was working handheld so multiple exposures and blending in Photoshop would have been an exersize in futility.
In the end I used a polarising filter to take the glare off the sky and vegetaion, and took a lot of shots, bracketing the exposures in 1/3rd stop increments to give me a chance of a reasonable single exposure. A lot of careful tweaking of settings during RAW file conversion gave me a starting image with a histogram that just fitted inside my preferred ProPhoto colour space, and that was followed by some serious contrast and colour palette adjustments in Photoshop to give what you see here.
At some point in the future I may try a different processing approach using 'pseudo HDR' techniques, but for now I'm really enjoying looking at this rendition and remembering how it felt to actually be there!
Filename - sandstone arch 02.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 17-40mm zoom @ 17mm
Exposure - 1/80sec @ f8, ISO400
Location - Devil's Bridge, Sedona, Arizona
This image - 533x800px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Polarising filter used to enhance colours.
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2026 unless otherwise stated.