As some of you may know, my family and I took a little vacation to the Northern part of Arizona. It was nothing major, only about a week, but we saw some of the most appealing sights that a man could see. We started our vacation off with the Grand Canyon. I’ll give you a warning right now, although my pictures do look awesome, the Grand Canyon in person is almost to much for a human to comprehend. I had been to the Grand Canyon when I was about 7, so I don’t remember it all that well. When I stepped out onto the overlook that rose high above the massive canyon, I was awed.
When you look over the edge and into the canyon, it is almost too much to look at. It’s hard if not impossible to comprehend and soak it all in. And when you get this feeling, photographing it isn’t going to be easy.
The saying goes something along the lines of “It’s what you leave out that makes your photographs amazing, not what you include” If you ever go to the Grand Canyon and try to leave everything in, it doesn’t look right. When you zoom in, it doesn’t look right either. Close-ups just don’t make sense in the Grand Canyon, and neither do wide angled photos. So what did I do? I just let myself take pictures and not really worry about rules. I tried to be creative, to submerse myself into the beauty of the Grand Canyon and photographing it.
We toured around the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, seeing it from all the different angles. Unfortunately, no matter where we went, haze littered my photographs. What’s sad is the fact that all of the haze in the Grand Canyon is caused by pollution. That’s where your polarizer comes to the rescue. If you’re ever going to the Grand Canyon, always remember your polarizer.
It you don’t know what a polarizer does, it is basically a screw on filter that cuts down on reflections on objects. It can be used to take the sun’s reflection out of a stream to taking haze out of a sky, as demonstrated in my photographs.
Although a polarizer can help a lot, usually it isn’t enough. Once I imported all of the photos into Lightroom and had a good look at them, there was still plenty of haze, washing out colors and making the pictures downright ugly. To fix this, I cranked up that contrast slider and bam! The haze was gone! It’s amazing what Lightroom can do.
So, enough of me babbling on and on, I let you look at the photos now. They’re below:
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