Monuments in Alignment

In this image Agathla Peak stands illuminated in the distance, partly blocked by the shadowy Porras Dikes. Church Rock stands illuminated in the foreground. Agathla Peak, also known as El Capitan, is about 6.5 miles from the camera position. It is a sheer volcanic plug that rises 1500 feet above its base. Porras Dikes, about 1.5 miles away from the camera position, sits atop Comb Ridge. These volcanic dikes are 300 feet high and are named after Francisco de Porras, who was a missionary to the Hopis between 1629 and 1633. Church Rock is formed by another series of volcanic dikes which are also 300 feet high. These three amazing monuments, and many more, are situated on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona.

Revisiting the Image

I originally posted this image in April 2006, shortly after it was captured. Although the image was then a favorite of mine, as time passed I started realizing it was not what I wanted it to be. The image no longer brought back the feeling of that place to my mind. I knew the qualities needed were held within the image, but my processing of it simply failed to bring them out. This finally bothered me enough to spend most of an evening making some subtle but very important changes. Since capturing this image took loads of time and effort, the processing needed to be as perfect as I could make it. Quite a bit of time and effort goes into most images, but this one is exceptional. Let me explain.
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Looking at this scene through the camera's viewfinder for the first time was exciting. I thought "this could be something special". But later the same evening while viewing the image on the laptop screen, I wished the rather bland sky was nicer. I also couldn't seem make what I thought was an optimal composition from what I had captured. It was then that I determined the final image should be nearly square. The next day I did what I always do under these circumstances. I went back and captured the same scene again, this time composing it to be cropped nearly square. The sky was still not what I wanted, but I couldn't stay at this location forever. We left the area the next day under the same bland sort of sky, with thoughts of this image eating away at my brain. On the drive to our next location I told my wife way too many times how I wished I could have done something better with this. I also talked about the fact that cropping the image to square proportions would throw away a lot of data and potential quality. I'm not sure how she puts up with me. Anyway, a couple days later we walked out of our motel room to a wonderful, turbulent sky of heavy broken clouds. It was the sky I wanted for this shot a few days before. After a couple minutes discussing logistics, we were making the hundred mile drive back to try capturing this image a third time. Along the way my wife suggested using a longer lens and stitching several vertical shots together. That would give my nearly square composition far more data than even a full single frame composition. At first I thought it would be impossible to get enough depth of field with the long focal length that would be required to do this. Thinking more about the idea while driving, I realized that the foreground rocks were not all that close to the camera position, and the idea actually might work. Our drive that day resulted in the image shown here. Three rapidly sequenced 16.7 megapixel exposures were taken at 420 mm and F16. These were later stitched together and then cropped to the format seen here, which retains approximately 36 mega pixels of data. After all of that, I can hardly complain about spending a few hours to better optimize it.
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On September 5, 2007 I am once again as happy with this image as I was in April 2006. Of course that may not always be so. Images are truly finished only when the photographer is gone. One's knowledge and experience grow over the years, or at least they should. If previously captured images are to be all they can be, it is important to occasionally revisit them with all of the tools at one's disposal.