Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Arches National Park

Arches National Park is probably very popular because of the famous Delicate Arch you can see even on Utah car license plates. For me it's a bit much - like in Poland with everything connected to John Paul II. If you overuse something, it's getting boring.
But this day our decision was to do something else with Delicate - go there for a sunset, take some pictures in gold light of late sun, then leave there till the sky will get black and everyone is gone. As usual, life verified our plans. Firstly there wasn't a good sunset - we had a lot of clouds and colors were not as perfect as we imagined. So we failed to take good pictures of Delicate in sunset light. Plan A failed.
Then we moved to plan B. In this scenario we planned to use our headlights to illuminate the arch and take some different pictures using long exposures. What's interesting it turned out that one old guy (let's call him Gringo) from New Mexico planned to do the same thing, but as later appeared, was prepared much better than us. Finally when only three of us left up there, we started to discuss different ideas and testing our light sources.

Gringo had a typical incandescent flashlight and it was giving yellow, warm colors on the arch in the dark. We had two led headlights that were giving us rather cold, white-blue colors. We agreed with Gringo to synchronize and first take pictures with all three cameras using his flashlight, then try it with ours. It was a good polish-american cooperation, like in Iraq :) Finally we got few interesting pictures. The only problem we had was focusing. Autofocus didn't work, because it was pitch black. I was trying to figure out what could be the distance to the arch and set focus manually, but finally it was very difficult and we ended with few nice pictures, but still out of focus. So idea was good, but execution not so perfect. About 10 p.m. we got bored and decided to get to the car - about 3 miles over not very well marked trail in the complete dark - moon was not there on that day. Gringo decided to go with us, so we took him. Fortunately I had saved gps track and we somehow got to the car and even led Gringo with us. He was very happy and we parted with him at the parking below.
This day we had a night reserved in Devil's Garden campground. Very nice place. It was warm night and we had an opportunity to sleep well before Double O'Arch trail planned for the next morning. We even had our private rock formation near the pad.
Next day first thing in the morning we headed to Double O'Arch trail. We passed Landscape Arch, then Wall Arch and some other minor formations. It took us some time to get to Double O'Arch, but we finally arrived. It's really amazing place to take pictures (of course when other people are not present, but it wasn't the case). Unfortunately light wasn't perfect - we just arrived a bit too late. In spite of all I was trying to take some good pictures. Hope you'll have a chance to see some of them pretty soon.
Then we returned to the campground, folded the tent and went to the Delicate Arch for another evening pictures. This time light was favorable and we took many great pictures.

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