Antelope Cyn 2014

Photos from the floor of this deep canyon are challenging, as the high dynamic range HDR is beyond the range of most digital cameras to capture in a single exposure. The American Indians who own this canyon are taking larger numbers of tourists, not allowing tripods, nor letting indivduals part from the group, so taking images without other people in the views is not easy to do, and HDR is simply not possible due to the slower shutter speeds needed in some of the dim light scenes. I did my shooting "handheld" and took several redundant shots at each scene so as to select one that had the least blur in each sequence. The post processing was pushing my Canon 7D image to give the best range of light values needed to display the marvelous colors visible in the canyon without the usual HDR techniques that would have made the work easier to manage. Unfortunately the restriction of not being allowed to use tripods and the too crowded conditions made HDR techniques impractical. I believe the Indian operators do run "photography tours" which may allow tripods, but most find the prices for those tours to be too expensive. Our ordinary tour was priced at $33 each person for a 1-hour tour, in a crowd beyond imagining!

These photos were done at advanced higher ISO settings to give handheld shots a chance of reasonable motion blur, which would not have been a problem at all if a tripod was used.
Around 2/3rds of the exposures were discarded due to blurred images. I hope the ones I've shown are impressive to you....

You may wish to see some of my HDR images from my 2002 visit to Antelope Canyon: http://ronblacktravels.com/Antelope%20Canyon%202002%20HDR/index.htm