I wish I could put my finger on why images of slot canyons are so well received. This shot is from Canyon X which resides on the upper tributary of what becomes the more famous Antelope Canyon. I don’t have much anecdotal or cool to say about it except that slot canyons are hot and sandy, dugh. They are also surprisingly variable. One would think that images from the same places all look the same but it depends greatly on the angle of the sun at that time of year. Those sought after ghostly rays don’t happen unless the sun is at the right angle which happens significantly more during May through August and at specific times during the day. This would seem obvious enough but most visitors to Antelope Canyon aren’t aware of it as most now are not professional photographers.

This image is a composite of four bracketed shots. I used the exposure fusion method to combine them and then did some selective tone mapping of different layers in Photoshop. Very little was added in terms of saturation. I think many of the shots you will see that look flat are just the camera trying to compensate for such an extreme contrast range. Yah for digital as you can’t do this with film.

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