I lived in Arizona for 18 years and am still angry with myself for not taking photographic advantage of the state's great diversity & beauty during my time there. This image was made last year, on a visit to the Grand Canyon with my wife. It is a tribute to an old friend who introduced me to the wonders of Canyon hiking in the early 90's, and who passed away in 2000 at the young age of 38.
I picked this photo from my favorites from Arizona because the summer "monsoon" season is one of the big reasons why my husband and I moved back to Arizona. This was taken one evening last summer from my front porch.
Whoa! This is awesome. Did you use any kind of triggering device?
Guy
Posted by Stacy Egan on April 21, 2006 at 11:36 PM
Thanks, Guy! No, I did not use a triggering device. That's the beauty of digital (and photographing storms at night to enable longer exposure times)! I played with different manual exposure settings, finding after several iterations that a setting of 8 seconds at f/8 ISO 200 works pretty good. This particular photo was from one of my earlier attempts of the evening: 15 seconds f/5.6 which ended up quite over-exposed but I could save it by reducing levels (as I dimly recall) in post-processing.
To obtain the shot, I pointed the camera (20D with 50mm lens), manually focused (I'm not sure on what, maybe the saguaro), and just kept pressing the shutter. Sometimes there would be lightning in the field of view, many times not. This was a very active storm, though, and I was able to get quite a few shots with lightning in them.
I catch a lot of flack from my one true love because I don't photograph Canyon De Chelly often enough. She may be a little biased though since she owns Thunderbird Lodge at the mouth of the canyon. I think this is one of my better shots from there.
Discussion
9 repliesI'm pretty sure this is Arizona, or somewhere very close to the state line.
Guy
Sadly, I haven't spent as much time down there as I'd like, but I was able to find this image I shot at the good old Grand Canyon about 10 years ago.
I picked this photo from my favorites from Arizona because the summer "monsoon" season is one of the big reasons why my husband and I moved back to Arizona. This was taken one evening last summer from my front porch.
Stacy Egan
Tucson, Arizona
Guy
To obtain the shot, I pointed the camera (20D with 50mm lens), manually focused (I'm not sure on what, maybe the saguaro), and just kept pressing the shutter. Sometimes there would be lightning in the field of view, many times not. This was a very active storm, though, and I was able to get quite a few shots with lightning in them.