Sunset Through Turret Arch

This is Turret Arch in the Windows section of Arches, with the sun sitting right in the opening as it went down.

Shooting straight into the sun is usually a bad idea and I do it anyway more than I should. You expose for the sky, the rock goes to black, or you expose for the rock and the sky blows out completely. This one is four frames blended together as an “HDR” image converted to black and white.

The starburst is just a narrow aperture doing what a narrow aperture does, and I like that it puts something sharp and geometric in the middle of all that soft eroded sandstone.

Late light on that rock goes orange, and color usually turns the whole frame into the same postcard everybody else brings home from Arches. Without it you can actually see the formation, the big opening and the smaller hole up on the face to the left, and the spire between them.

The foreground is nothing special on purpose. Sagebrush, dirt, a few rocks that a few million people have walked past. This park gets photographed more than almost anywhere in Utah, and I’m not out here trying to find an angle nobody’s found. This one’s about the light coming through a hole in a rock at the end of the day.

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