At The Gates

Congratulations! This is the Image of the Week selection for the Landscapes Gallery, week ending 13th July, 2012! >Click here for large version<

Of all the National Parks that I have ever visited in the US, Arches NP is without a doubt the most iconic one. Millions of photographs have been shot here, and to come up with something different is not easy. That does not mean one shouldn't try though, and I personally greatly enjoy thinking of new possibilities to photograph iconic subjects.

Double Arch is one of them. When you're standing below this imposing marvel of nature, it's hard to not be impressed by the size and the beauty of this amazing structure. From my research for my visit to Arches, I learned that 99.9% of all the images of this arch are more or less taken from the same viewpoint. I'm sure one of the reasons for this is that you need some distance to get the whole thing to fit inside your frame - standing inside the arch is not going to work. Unless of course you have a 14mm on a full frame camera. But even then it was tough to find a position where I could get all the openings and the lines at the right places - it only worked with a vertical composition. I was fine with that, because the vast majority of images taken of this arch are all horizontals.

I also decided to photograph the arch at night and to bring out the details and colors by using a flashlight. The advantage of doing this also meant that there would be stars, and stars are nice. I wanted to include part of the Milky Way, which meant that I had only a very short window of time to take the shot. These decisions were all very important in order to create something original, but the most important one for me was to include a human figure. It brings the shot to life and it acts as a vital scale element. The fact that most landscape photographers don't like humans in their pictures is always a nice bonus when you're trying to create something original.

This was shot three years ago as a double exposure - one for the sky with my lovely assistant, one for the light painting. We tried to shoot it again with our group on this year's Arches Under The Stars workshop, but the weather gods did not want to cooperate. They gave use snow the next day though, so that made up for that.

Your comments are appreciated as always.

Marsel

...pure awesomeness!!

Incredible, Marsel. The best Double Arch shot I've ever seen.

Spectacular (though to my eye the flashlight nearest the top seems a bit overbright -- quite a trivial point on such a superb image.)

This is beautiful. Love the human figure for a sense of scale.

Awesome, the human figure is a fantastic detail

What a fantastic shot.Kudos to you sir.

This is definitely a unique and ultra interesting shot of double Arch!

Fantastic!

Your efforts paid off handsomely! Great shot with a well chosen perspective.

SFJ

This is a remarkably well composed, well thought out, well executed, engaging image. Wow. Just wow!

Incredible

All I can say is . . . WOW!

Amazing shot. The inclusion of the human element really makes this exceptional.

I LOVE this! Simply stunning Marsel!

Thist is great!

This is marvelous. Gorgeous shot

Amazing shot-congrats!

If I took a shot like this I wouldn't be waiting 3 years to process it.

kahkityoong wrote:If I took a shot like this I wouldn't be waiting 3 years to process it.

LOL. I know, it's ridiculous. It's just that with all the workshops and the traveling I can barely find the time to go through the images that I've shot, let alone process them. This week I started processing images from South Africa from 2009 and images from Japan from 2008.