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Place Where Light Flows Through Rocks

Water flowed through here to carve this canyon, but light flows in and changes the way that we see it. The sun's light is made up of all the colors of the rainbow, but a clear sky scatters blue light, making it appear blue.

The human perceptual system handles the changing light conditions by trying to assign the brightest light to white, coloring our perception of everything else around us. Further complicating the situation, we have only limited capacity to notice and remember color. What color is snow? Everyone knows that it's white. Yet if you look at it on a clear day and pay close attention, it's often a blue-white. When you notice that the light in the shadows on snow are very blue from blue sky light, it becomes apparent that you can see something like snow your whole life, yet never fully notice or comprehend its true color.

Can you photograph something well if you are not accustomed to fully seeing it? Even if your camera captures it faithfully, you might get home and "correct" the color out.

People often ask the camera that was used, or the exposure settings, but those can literally vary by the minute, so knowing them for someone else's situation will not help you in yours. Often what's most important to know are not answers, but rather the right questions to ask.

#antelopecanyon #southwest #landscapephotography
www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com

Jeff Sullivan

Jeff Sullivan leads landscape photography workshops in national parks and public lands throughout California and the American West.

View Comments

  • Jeff - this is a very interesting image that you created. It appears very similar to an image that was all over the web last winter, of a desert southwest cave, and a shaft of 'blue light' coming down from an opening to the sky above. I believe the caption said, that the photo commanded a million dollar sale. Did you see this story?

    I also appreciated and related closely to what you described about light properties and conditions as I have been making time exposure photographs of the night sky since I was 14 with my first self purchased telescope, and strapped my parents Kodak Box camera to it, manually guiding the telescope for say, up to several minutes, but only using Black & White Kodak Tri-x film back then on 1967. Later at age 18, while starting college then, I purchased and used a new 35mm Mamiya/Sekor 1000DTL to take over a thousand slide transparencies, Kodachromes, etc. I still have that original camera and all the transparencies
    I now attach the old Mamiya 55mm f/1.8 lens to my latest Sony NEX5 digital, to photograph the night skies celestial objects.

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