Nikon D800 Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm f/13 ISO 100 9 image HDR
When we travel it’s great to get a different view of the area, and a hot air balloon ride is a great way to do it. I highly recommend seeing everything you can while on vacation. Soak in the sights, sounds, and views from everywhere you can, especially a thousand feet above the ground. These are my favorites.
As a relatively new photographer ,I don’t have a ton of work from the past, so now and then I don’t have anything fresh to post. So here’s an image I shot last year in September,for which many people have expressed their adoration. I was up early searching for a sunrise picture. Everywhere I drove, I came away empty handed. The scene was either too cloudy, or too congested, or too blah, or too, well, not inspiring. This church was one of the places I had paused in front of earlier but nothing stood out, nothing caught my eye. When I returned, with my new vantage point, I could place the Sun behind the church and see its rays play in the morning mist. The clouds that had earlier obscured the dawn, broke into soft patterns across the sky, transforming the solid blue into gradients of azure. Then (purely by accident of course) the hot air balloon drifted into frame. Click!
Nikon D800 Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 38mm f/10 ISO 100 7 image HDR
I thought I would give some explanation as to why there are giant rocks around Sedona and how they came to be there. Best I can figure out from my reading is that they are ancient, and when I say ancient, I mean 100 million years ago, when the world was vastly different from the way it appears today. Eons ago the top of the cliffs may have been beachfront property as the Pacific Ocean’s waves crashed against them. This thinking seems somewhat backwards from what would be obvious to anyone standing at their base, that these giant red rocks somehow were pushed up from within the Earth. Maybe volcanic activity , or tremendous earthquakes birthed these immense structures. Or maybe (which seems more of a consensus) the softer more porous ground around them just eroded away, revealing the landscape we know today as Sedona.
Nikon D4 Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 plus Sigma 1.4 tele @ 250mm f/7.1 ISO 250 1/500 sec
