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Sunset at The Windows are of Arches National Park. Clouds were around, so a long exposure was needed. I also snapped off plenty of "static" shots this evening with the other camera. You may remember the nice rainbow captures at this time. They were taken while this long exposure was underway. The rainbow popped into view off to the right of camera.
The Window is the heart of Arches National Park where you can see a few arches. W e found this alignment of the Window and Turret Arch and later one aligning with the Milky Way
My friend Rick Louie and I went down to the desert southwest to get one last photo trip in before the end of the year and since I had never been to either Arches or Canyonlands National Parks, it made since to visit Moab.
79 stacked exposures of Double Arch on a cold December night, this night was a lot of fun. I was absolutely loving the abstract feel to Double Arch when looking up from underneath!
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North & South Window Arches in Arches National Park as sunset approaches bathing the red rocks in glorious lighting.
If you look closely in the arch to the left, there are about a dozen people standing there, looking like eyelashes :))
A roadside pulloff while heading back to the Chisos Basin area along the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive. I know from past experience when one sees beautiful mountains with the eyes and they seem to fill the mind with a grandeur and enormousness that a camera often can't quite capture. What I did in order to kind of capture that feel was to angle my SLR camera slightly downward. The idea would be to complement the setting with the nearby desert landscape and lead the eye in the image to the mountain peaks. One of the things I loved about this particular stop was that how The Window seemed to line up just right to be a frame for Casa Grande off in the distance. On one side of The Window area is Carter Peak and the other is Vernon Bailey Peak.
The Windows - North Window Arch.
L'arco è alto circa 15.5 metri e largo circa 28 metri.
The Windows - North Window Arch.
The arch is approximately 15.5 meters high and 28 meters wide.
IMG20250621163138m
"Arches National Park", Utah, Arches, "The Windows", "Double Arch"
Another view of Turret Arch from the North Window from a shoot at a photo workshop put together by my uncle Jon Fuller and renowned photographer Tom Till out at Arches National Park at Sunrise. 7 images blended to bring out more detail and color.
Sunrise light bends around this cliff face as I was standing under the North Window looking out over this majestic view that is Utah. I could face this view every morning :)
Even zooming back to bring back the focal length couldn't quite capture the look I had at this slight rise on the trail while hiking down to The Window area off in the distance. All around are enormous mountain peaks and a rugged landscape that are the remnants of a volcanic past. The setting is of rolling hillside after another, dotted with greens and yellows of trees and grasses spread all across the Chisos Basin area. Above are blue skies with wisps of clouds blowing from one direction to another. There's a silence that comes from starting off the trail by oneself with only a slight breeze blowing by. But I still tried to capture that view nevertheless. That's what this image was about. So I angled my SLR camera slightly downward hoping to capture more of that wide-open expansive view looking across the Chisos Basin to The Window and mountain peaks off in the distance.
The Windows - North Window Arch.
L'arco è alto circa 15.5 metri e largo circa 28 metri.
The Windows - North Window Arch.
The arch is approximately 15.5 meters high and 28 meters wide.
IMG20250621163510m
From a roadside pulloff on the Basin Road leading into the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park. The view is looking down and across the Basin area to the peaks and ridges called The Window off in the distance. My thinking in composing this image was to capture a sweeping view across this national park landscape and bring the mountains higher into the upper portion of the image. In my mind, that would help to minimize the more negative space of the blue skies, while having that portion be a color contrast to the earth-tones in the lower portion of the image.
Warm light bathes the north arch and also all those eye lashes (people there walking under the arch).
While many of the images I captured that morning hiking to The Window were wider angle ones allow one to take in the view seem with the eyes typical during a hike, I found this one portion deserving a close in look, showing the rich details and colors present. This was a view looking to the west-southwest to an unknown set of peaks while on a hike to The Window in Big Bend National Park.
While at the main lodge and overlook to the northwest and The Windows not long before sunset (and an oncoming rain storm). My thinking in composing this image was to follow ideas I’d seen on Flickr and Instagram where one captures an image not just of a setting to one's front, but also on the LCD screen of an SLR or mirrorless camera. Kind of like two images in one. Composition was a matter of lining up my SLR camera as well as my iPhone to have both of these images angled properly. I then metered for the brighter areas off in the distance while having a focal point to the nearby LCD screen.
An image captured on the main Basin road with a view looking to the west and The Windows with the peaks and mountainsides of the Chisos Mountains all around. My thinking in composing this image was to capture a more sweeping view across this West Texas landscape. To do so, I had to angle my Nikon SLR camera slightly downward and bring the mountains higher up into the image. The rest was balancing the setting to include some of the blue skies above.
This was a view looking to the northeast while hiking back to the Chisos Mountains Lodge from The Window. Quite simply, what I wanted to capture with this image was the hiking trail I was on. I felt that the hiking trail was kind of a leading line heading off into the distance. With the cactus plants and the other desert-mountain vegetation all around, it kind of led the eye forward to the rugged mountainside of Pulliam Peak off in the distance.
I liked the layers of peaks that seemingly came one after another, from the nearby fold of terrain to the hillside a short stroll away and then finally a mountain peak of the Chisos Mountains off in the distance.
Before walking further ahead to the walls that encompassed The Window, I decided to hold back and capture this image using the nearby walls as a frame for some of the peaks and desert setting of Big Bend National Park far off in the distance. In some ways, the creek that ran by me and on downward through The Window was kind of a leading line for the eye as it moved forward into the image.
Just to the point to not venture further with the slick rocks but still far enough to capture that view beyond...
Very late day capture at Arches National Park. Taken looking west towards The Windows area, with same last minute color hitting the underside of the clouds. 1/2 hour early people were everywhere for sunset ... I was all alone by now, just when things were getting pretty ... the air temperature was not just below 100 degrees F. Perfect time to the there!
When I took this image on my hike to the South Rim, I really just wanted to focus on this one mountain peak with The Window kind of leading off into the distance on the left portion of the image. It was only later when I looked at it on my computer while doing some post-processing that I had a chance to really started look at the details that I'd captured. Leading up to the mountain, one could see the teeny tiny trees with the folds in the landscape. Then on the mountainside, the shadows from the sunlight to the east brought out the outcropping and even layers present. Finally on top, there's even more details with the teeny tiny trees and weathered remains of the mountain.
An evening view through the Window from the Pinnacles Trail in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park.
A conversion to black & white using Silver Efex Pro 2 where I used some color filters to bring out a much richer tonal contrast for the final image. This really came out even more with the areas still in shadows and others in the mid-morning sunlight.
A very red, hazy sunrise through the South Window Arch from the base of Turret Arch. This treatment may be over done but not by much. The air was quite hazy and smokey for too much of our visit. The sunrise traffic at The Windows is pretty steady.
The Chisos Mountains have shade and rainfall, making the Chisos Basin a large oasis in the Chihuauan Desert.
The water flows out through this creek, and then over falls at The Window. This scene is just a couple hundred meters from The Window.
The setting sun casts the shadow of Turret Arch onto the nose of the "The Spectacles" (aka The Windows); Arches National Park, Moab...
A view looking to the east up Pulliam Peak while on a hike back from The Window while in Big Bend National Park. While I admit this was an amazing view looking up this mountainside, what I also liked and what drew me into this image was the setting of greens and yellows going up this mountainside. I felt that it was just the right color contrast to the blues and whites of the skies above.
A mid morning view while hiking up a mountainside on my way to the South Rim in Big Bend National Park. Here I looked back to the northwest to take in a view to The Window and views beyond. I knew there was no way I'd be able to capture any image above the nearby hillside of trees for the view of the far-off mountain peaks. However that nearby area was still in the shadows since the sun had not crested over some of the mountain peaks to the east. Vernon Bailey and Carter Peaks though were fully caught in the mid morning sunlight that day. I metered the image for the brighter portions of the mountainside not wanting to lose those colors and textures...but there was the shadows...So I worked initially with Capture NX2 but then decided to try out something I'd recently read with an HDR program I'd bought that had been updated. I used a single RAW image I captured from my Nikon SLR camera and then used Aurora HDR to bring out much more vibrant and truer colors to that mid morning in the Chisos Mountains during a recent stay. I later cropped some of the nearby portion to create a feel for a more panoramic image.
The Window is the heart of Arches National Park where you can see a few arches. W e found this alignment of the Window and Turret Arch and later one aligning with the Milky Way
Twelve-frame panorama looking east from Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive in Big Bend National Park toward the Chisos Mountains with Casa Grande visible through The Window in the center of the frame. Even though I got four hours of rain at my campsite the night before, it was nothing but blue skies by the following afternoon.
I've read a number of times in photography magazines about the value of capturing images with the portrait orientation. While definitely an important consideration while composing an image, here though I wanted to capture that orientation for another reason. I would have the full range of near to far to show and lead the eye. Water from a creek flowing beneath my feet, I could use as a leading line while letting the walls of The Window to focus the eyes and view to another set of peaks. Finally beyond all this were other barely visible portions of Big Bend National Park with blue skies with clouds above.
As I neared The Window while on the hike that morning, I turned around to take in the views seen on my hike from a different perspective. As I looked to the path just recently walked, I wanted to capture that view with the sheer walls all around me and trees going up the mountainsides.
As I walked along the hiking trail, there were the natural rises and falls as it followed the contours of terrain. This is one of those times where I just happened to be on a higher point and had a chance to look across the desert-mountain landscape of the Chisos Basin where I was to hike that morning. As I stood taking in this view, all around were the rugged and jagged mountain peaks with The Window far off in the distance.
For composing the image, I had to remember that the angle is definitely downward for this hiking trail, so angling my camera slightly downward was even more important to capture that look across this Big Bend landscape. I later converted to black & white using Silver Efex Pro 2 where I used some color filters to bring out a much richer tonal contrast for the final image.
Looking west through The Window from the Pinnacles Trail in the Chisos Basin of Big Bend National Park.
After capturing the shots at The Windows at sunset, I stuck around as it got darker. It was very cool being at this location with no people around by then, just soaking up the peace and quite there as the temperatures dropped quickly into the 80's from the sunset temperature of 103 degrees F.
This shot I actually underexposed quite a lot. I could have deleted when I saw the histogram, but kept it anyway to see what was recoverable from LR-4. I could lighten this some, but the noise is extensive, but I do like this keeping the silhouette look with the blue hour clouds streaming by as night started to set in there.
I do have some correctly exposed captures from this time as well that I am processing and will post soon. An incredible location that was a joy to be in at that time of day.
Arches National Park, Utah