Mourning the sandstorm

It's gone. I've lost it through a combination of carelessness and dumb luck. Pleading and bargaining with fate has failed. My efforts to do an end-around have failed. I have to force myself to accept the ugly truth: My beloved Monument Valley Sandstorm, Infrared, is no more.

Oh, I still have a gorgeous 36x24 gallery wrap on my office wall, and the web-sized version you see here persists. But the original RAW file is gone. The full-resolution tiff and Photoshop working files are gone. The finished-edit jpeg is gone. Which means I can never make another quality print of this image, which resonates with me at a level hard to explain.

The sad discovery of my loss came about because I had an offer to publish it in an upcoming photography book. I felt all the regular emotions--excitement, validation, yadda yadda--which quickly gave way to sorrow and denial when I could not find a single print-quality file. I'd had many multiples of this image on my home computer, my laptop, my work computer... all gone. My work computer ran out of hard drive space early this past spring, so I deleted all of my personal stuff to clear operating room. My laptop suffered a Windows implosion, so I did a clean install, wiping everything from it. All those duplicate files on my home computer? I deleted those duplicates, and apparently the master file as mixed in amongst those. Ah, but what about the official backup, the one kept by The Wife? Well, those turned out to be on an external hard drive I accidentally knocked off her desk and destroyed whilst attempting to install some new hardware. The awful part is that this drive continued to function for another dozen hours or so before going kaput, hours we foolishly did not use to transfer everything off it. We couldn't remember what was on it at the time, and didn't worry too much, because there were multiple copies of files kept elsewhere. Except those that weren't.

Other images are gone as well. All of my photos from the Very Large Array (with the sole exception of "Listening to Nightfall") and the Horseshoe and the Grand Canyon... Some of those were good photographs. None of them were great. All of them can be replicated, more or less, by me in the future if I ever return to those locales. But Monument Valley? In a sandstorm? Under these unique lighting conditions? Never gonna happen.

It's hard to let go, but it's time to move on.

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The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 2

When we last saw Clark, Ellen, Rusty and Audrey, they were hurtling from Four Corners to Monument Valley in the venerable FamilyMover 3000 during a hellacious sand storm. At least, that's how the soundtrack plays in my mind. You know how you can plan something out in your mind, envision the perfect scenario and look forward to it for months, if not years? Yes? Now imagine that tightening knot that forms in your stomach when it becomes clear that all that careful planning is for naught, but on the conscious level your mind won't accept the fact and insists on pressing on in desperate hope that somehow a miracle will occur, the skies will part and everything will turn out perfect just like in a Disney movie.

That's how our drive to Monument Valley through the sand storm went. Only nobody was singing "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" this day. The Wife had eagerly looked forward to shooting that iconic paroramic view southbound from U.S. 163, but this is what we saw instead:

I shot almost everything with my infrared camera. I'd long heard that infrared can cut through hazy conditions, and it didn't get hazier than inside a sandstorm. Alas, infrared turned out to be no magic bullet. Flying sand blocks infrared light almost as well as it does visual. As we got closer, the view cleared a little due to proximity and allowed us glimpses of some of the famous formations. Here, left to right, is the Stagecoach, King on His Throne and the big Saddleback mesa.

We reached the visitor's center inside the Navajo park and fled inside, sand pelting us like some insane, rapid-fire BB gun as we ran across the parking lot. Granted, they were very tiny BBs, but they still stung. Again, we wound up with grit in our eyes, hair, teeth, ears, etc. Outside was still unpleasant, but the wind seemed to be subsiding a bit and if we looked directly overhead and squinted a bit, we could just make out a tiny patch of blue sky. Maybe the sandstorm was finally subsiding? We decided to make the drive down into the valley and view the formations up close while waiting for sunset (since we certainly couldn't see them well from the visitor's center). The move seemed to be a smart one. As we drove along, the dust did appear to settle a bit. More blue came out overhead. The wind wasn't howling as fiercely. The Wife and I ventured out on two occasions to shoot without getting shredded--although the image of Elephant Butte below clearly shows a heck of a lot of dust still in the air.

Despite the hardships, I still managed to make some art. The image below surprised me--until I began processing it, I figured it was a throwaway. To the right is Merrick Butte, with the West Mitten Butte and Sentinel Mesa to the left. The gradient, lighting and billowing dust grew more striking the more I tweaked the image, and I have to say I'm very pleased with this image. I think it's powerful and evocative. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than to be good.

I also managed a few moderately successful visible light shots as well. This is, literally, the most sky we saw that day. Between Merrick Butte and the West Mitten Butte, silhouettes of Saddleback, Bear and Rabbit, Big Indian and King On His Throne can be seen in the background.

Shortly thereafter, the wind picked up and the sky turned wholly brown. Sand blew across the road in waves, and the sun faded from the sky almost two hours before sunset. We threw in the towel and turned around. A few hours later we pulled in to our motel in Page. There was so much sand in the shower afterwards it looked as if we'd just gotten back from a particularly rowdy day at the beach.

The next day we set off for the North Rim of the Grand Canyon under skies that were startlingly blue in light of the dull murk from the day before. On the way, though, just south of Page was one famous natural formation I was determined to shoot, especially since the Monument Valley fiasco. Horseshoe Bend is a steep, omega-shaped gorge right off the highway where the Colorado River has carved out Glen Canyon, sort of a warm-up act for the Grand Canyon. It's a popular float trip, and we saw several boats and rafts on the river down below.

From the parking lot there's a hill to climb, then a half-mile walk to the overlook. Much of the walk is in sand, which complicates matters when you're lugging a lot of heavy photographic equipment. And one thing that isn't conveyed in any of the thousands of Horseshoe Bend photos online is the fact that the rim of the canyon is literally a precipitous cliff. There's the edge, and then a thousand-foot drop straight down. The Wife immediately gave up any thoughts of shooting and instead rode herd on the kids, who were intent on getting as close to the edge as possible, presumably to try some insane daredevil stunt. After a short while of this, she decided to usher them back to the car instructing me in that sweet tone of voice that veils a murderous threat, "Don't be too long." Not being too long posed a bit of a problem, as there were several good vantage points along the rim to shoot, but these were already taken up by photographers set up with tripods and other gear. Much of the rest of the rim featured only obstructed views. On occasion, one would pick up and move, but as I was trying to move in to take his place, tourists would hand me their camera asking if I'd take their picture "Since you look like you know what you're doing." By the time I'd finished with them, someone had swooped into the spot I'd wanted.

I finally gave up on using my tripod, and instead dropped down on my belly and scooched to the edge of a not very ideal outcropping of rock. I'm not normally scared of heights, but this position was positively vertigo-inducing. I ended up placing the ultrawide angle lens on my camera, holding it out over the edge, and shooting "best guess" without composing through the viewfinder. Not very professional, I know, but I wanted something to show for my efforts. I took a lot of worthless shots, but some were decent. And not a whole lot of people have infrared images of Horseshoe Bend.

I also shot color as well, and am generally pleased with this image for color and composition. One thing I learned, however. The sun rises to the photographer's back, so the high cliff walls cast very harsh shadows. The best time to shoot, therefore (if you're not under overcast skies) is either sunset, midday or right at dawn. Mid-morning like I was shooting, normally an acceptable time for landscapes, proved problematic. Midday would normally be terrible, but for this particular formation it should work very well.

I quickly gathered my gear, hoofed it back to the car and learned to curse sandy walkways. In short order I'd gulped down a couple of bottles of water, toweled myself off and set off with the rest of the family to the Grand Canyon, confident the worst of our problems were behind us. Yeah, silly me.

A full gallery of road trip photos can be found here.
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 1
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 2
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 3
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 4
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 5
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 6
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 7
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 8

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