Stills in the slot canyon

In the heart of desert sandstone lay slot canyons carved by water as it courses down after sudden squalls. The sinuous walls of the canyon, etched by eons of wind and water, reveal intricate layers, like ancient manuscripts waiting to be deciphered. Wandering the multitude of canyons in Navajo Nation was a perfect opportunity to explore the delicate beauty hidden within rugged depths. A black and white treatment for these images helps focus on the patterns and details, rather than the muted colors that the canyon originally presented.

Navajo Nation
AZ USA

Chasms in the sandstone

In the red sandstone canyons of the Navajo Nation, there lies one replete with mysterious curves that bend and reflect the light in strange ways. Even mid-day sometimes never makes it down the canyon, but it highlights the striations that wind along the sinuous walls. Its a delightful photographic journey to walk down the canyon and immersing in the beautiful creation of water.

Navajo Nation
AZ USA

Crack in the Earth

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Crack in the Earth
While walking through a narrow slot canyon in one of Texas's two National Parks, I came across this scene featuring a desert tree reaching up to the sky from the sheer walls of this canyon in Guadalupe Mountain National Park. I remember commenting to my travel partner that this composition reminded me of similar iconic silhouettes captured in other canyons. I tried to recreate such a composition from my memory using this tree as the foreground.

Does this work? Thoughts?

Guadalupe Mountains National Park
TX USA

The Canyon Walk

The graceful red sandstone slot canyons of Antelope Canyon has always had a special draw, and a few years ago, I satiated my yearnings with a photography tour of these photogenic canyons. Photography the mid-day sun beams light up the canyon in a golden red glow is an experience like no other. So it saddened me to hear that photography tours have been stopped here. From a financial perspective, these photography tours paled in sales compared to the bread and butter tours that they run in the canyon, due to the smaller group size as well as interruption to the regular tours.

Antelope Canyon
AZ USA

Sands of Time

It was a crowded jaded experience. I hardly imagined I would be able to capture the otherworldliness of the beautiful slot canyon. And yet, as the guide cleared the area, chanted some hymns and poured sand down the smooth sandstone ledge, it felt as though the sands of time had transported me back millenia. Back when the only masters of this desolate place were the wind and water which carved every curve and striation on the smooth walls.

My brain tried to juxtapose the ancient origins with the modern tourist clamor of the Upper Antelope slot canyons without much success. The mass of humanity on a hot summer day, replete with the smells wafting throughout and with the sounds bouncing and echoing all around, was overwhelming. And yet I knew that with the next thunderstorm, the natural forces of erosion would be masters again, carving this and many other beautiful canyons scattered through the desert southwest of the US

Antelope Canyon
AZ USA

The Wall

The Wall
A physical symbol of a divide between two regions. There exists many famous walls, the Great Wall, the Berlin Wall, the West Bank barrier, and the proposed addition to the border wall along the 1989 mi long border between Mexico and the US. But it was this wall, or lack thereof, deep in the heart of Big Bend National Park, that perhaps took me most by surprise.

The hike into Santa Elena Canyon, formed by the Rio Grande river as it cuts through a sandstone mesa, is a spectacular one. The beautiful narrow slot canyon with towering walls and a cooling breeze was a welcome transformation after hiking through a hot desert.

As I continued inwards, the walls narrowed in, and towards the very end of the trail, I spotted this smoothed piece of rock jutting out onto the river, with the other side mere feet away. The sandstone walls here rose hundreds of feet into the sky, opening up a only a quarter mile away. But right where I was, I could almost jump across onto Mexico.

The other side felt no different than where I was, and yet, the symbolism of this divide was powerful. The juxtaposition of the openness of landscape, and the purported urgency to close border, as conveyed by the leaders and the news media, was stark. I spent quite a bit of time contemplating why the nations are so different, and yet share the same piece of land. But all I could take away from this place was this image of the wall, or lack thereof, that I shot at F9, 1/400s at ISO 1600

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Big Bend National Park
TX USA

Lion's Head

As I turned around the corner deep in the bowels of Lower Antelope Canyon, I came across the Lion's Head, a natural formation in striated walls of the twisted canyon. Seeing this almost organic form set in the inorganic structure of sandstone took me by surprise. The strange forces of erosion had sculpted this unique canvas into such a familiar shape.

Perhaps what added to the atmosphere was one of the nearby tour-guides who scrambled up a nearby wall and started playing his Native American flute. A soothing melody filled in the small cavernous space around, increasing in clarity and meaning as the crowd grew silent trying to catch the song. The mellifluous song transported me to the past, to an age sans civilization, to an age of nature.

While I could never hope to capture that otherworldly feel in a static photograph, I did the best in capturing the essence of the Lion's Head that day in Lower Antelope Canyon

Lower Antelope Canyon
Page AZ