About twenty years ago I lived in St George, Utah so I could be close to Zion National Park. You see my dad grew up in the little town of Springdale, UT right at the entrance to Zion NP and loved to visit the area whenever he got the chance so, I grew up visiting Zion NP, hiking all the trails and really getting to know it. Fast forward twenty years and I am back in Zion with my husband and my mom and dad for a visit. Things have really changed…there are several new hotels, shops, restaurants, galleries and homes along the way to Zion. Springdale has become quite the thriving little community. And, you can’t drive your car into the park anymore due to the over five thousand vehicles that visit each summer day and only a few hundred places to park your car within the park. In order to save the park from being loved to death, they implemented a shuttle service which is very efficient. In addition to the changes and growth I see, I am now shooting digital and don’t have any digital images of Zion in my files. So, late yesterday afternoon, we headed to the bridge that looks down the Virgin River for the classic Watchman shot…
The contrast was greater than my camera could handle in one click so, you guessed it, I bracketed a five frame sequence and created an HDR image. This morning while I was looking over my favorite blogs, I read Scott Kelby’s blog on HDR and decided this was a good time to post this image. Whether you like HDR or not, it certainly has opened up new avenues of making images when the range of light is greater than my camera can capture. In the days of film, I would have had to live with a dark foreground to show detail on the Watchman and the sky or, I would have had to give up any detail in the Watchman and the sky to see the foreground. I, for one, embrace HDR…both the realistic and the surrealistic. Each style has a time and place and I have found many new opportunities to make images that would have proved nearly impossible in the past.
Image captured with Nikon D3S, AF-S 24-70mm on Lexar Digital Media
