Bryce Canyon National Park is Beautiful

 Bryce Canyon National Park is located in southwest Utah.  It is famous for it's towering pinnacles of multicolored rock called hoodoos.  The hoodoos are up to 20 stories tall.  When the hoodoos seem to glow when they are lit by the warm colors of the setting sun.

The Paiute Indians believed that the hoodoos were Legend People that the trickster Coyote had turned to stone.  They called them "red painted faces".  The first European to live here was a Mormon pioneer named Ebenezer Bryce.  His neighbors started calling the area Bryce's canyon.

 Bryce is so beautiful that everyone gets a good photo.  They usually take many more as they ooh and aah.  When they look at their photos later, they are disappointed.  They all look the same and are not nearly as spectacular as Bryce looked at the time.

 

It's important to provide a sense of scale. The photo above uses a tree to help demonstrate the size of the rocks.

 

This photo uses near and far objects to give a sense of distance.  It also uses the green of near and distant trees to provide contrasting color.

 

 Lighting is extremely important at Bryce.  It's easy to produce photos that merge all the hoodoos into a single red mass. The hoodoos need shadows to show that they are many separate towers.

 I used HDR (High Dynamic Range) for this group of photos.  This allowed me to provide texture in the brightly lit rocks and to provide details in dark shadows.  I made adjustments in processing to lighten and darken objects in the images.  

Using HDR significantly increases the number of exposures taken.  You can be accused of using the Spray and Pray technique. With the right subject, HDR can be spectacular.  If HDR doesn't work for a subject, you may find that the best single exposure wasn't the same setting as your camera's meter would have selected.

You Have to See It to Believe It

The Tinkertown Museum has buildings constructed out of over 50,000 bottles.  It has animated displays featuring thousands of hand-carved figures.  It has scraps and junk that has been reassembled into objects of beauty.  When you think that you have seen everything, you enter another room and are amazed all over again.

Tinkertown is the life work of an eccentric folk artist named Ross Ward.  He began his art career travelling with carnivals and painting at each stop.  He carved as a hobby for most of his life and started to exhibit his creations at each carnival location.  Eventually he created Tinkertown to showcase his work as a roadside attraction near Albuquerque.  When Ross died, his attraction became a museum.  It has been rated as one of the top 10 small museums in the United States.

The photos above and below show portions of Ross's car.  A sign nearby said that he turned his Jeep into a Lincoln by gluing thousands of pennies to the outside of the body.  That is an example of the subtle sense of Ross's humor that lives on in the museum.

 

I used a Canon 5D Mark III and a 24-70mm zoom for these images.  I used HDR and Photomatix Pro for tonemapping.

High Road to Taos

I stopped at a fascinating little gallery in an old house on the "High Road to Taos".  Most of the house was used for display.  One room served as an artist's studio.  I requested permission to photograph it.  The image above shows the room viewed from the entry exactly as the artist left it.  I used  a 3 exposure HDR to control the contrast.  I used a Canon 5D Mark II and a 24-70mm lens set to 30mm.

Three Sacred Places in the Land of Enchantment

San Geronimo Church

The Tiwa people had lived here for centuries before the Good News of the Gospel arrived.  The Franciscan friars were attracted by the permanent pueblo settlement and decided that it was lacking a church.  They used force to convert the natives and more force to encourage them to build a mission.  In 1680 the pueblo revolted, killed the friars and destroyed the church.

The Spanish were back a decade later and the pueblo was reconverted to Christianity.  The church was rebuilt.  In 1847 the United States Army occupied the area and sent a territorial governor to Taos.  With the Spanish gone, the Native People including some from the pueblo decided to govern themselves.  They assassinated the governor.  The United States Army attacked the pueblo.   The church walls were 4 feet thick.  Hundreds of women and children sought refuge there.  Many of them were killed when the army used artillery to destroy the church.  

The dead were buried in the cemetery next to the church.  The bell tower of the mission was rebuilt as a reminder of what had happed here.  A new church was built nearby and still stands.  The cemetery has been used for centuries.   It doesn't have clearly defined plots, bodies are buried among and on top of other bodies.  The simple wooden markers deteriorate and are removed.  The ground is considered holy ground and visitors are not allowed to enter.

The Sanctuario de Chimayó is known worldwide for its sacred dirt.  The church was built in 1871 following a series of miraculous events.  While the miracles are considerably different in several versions of the story they all agree on a divine presence at this spot. The church has been dubbed the “Lourdes of the United States".

Thousands pilgrims visit the church each year.  Many have reported miraculous healing during or after touching or eating the sacred dirt beneath the church.  Besides the hole containing the sacred soil, the church contains hundreds of crutches, casts, and other items that people discarded when they were cured. 

"The Ranchos de Taos Church," San Francisco de Asis, was completed in 1815 and provides one of the best examples of Franciscan Old World architectural ideals combined with New World building techniques.  It has walls that are four feet thick and enormous buttresses.  It is built of dried mud and needs to be recoated with mud on a regular basis. 

This church attracts artists and photographers as well as the church at Chimayo attracts pilgrims.  The front of the church is impressive, but artists are attracted to the back of the building and the way that light transforms the building.  It is the most photographed and most painted church in America.

Like the others before me, I wanted to show the building as more than a simple pile of mud.  I photographed the sun at the top corner of the building.  Since the range of light exceeded the capablity of my camera, I used a series of exposures to create a HDR (High Dynamic Range) image of the building.  The bright sun created a series of internal reflections within the lens.  The number of exposures multiplied the effect. A pair of birds dropped in to assist with the composition.  The resulting image combines form and fantasy, and clearly was taken in "the Land of Enchantment".