On a recent trip out west to Northern Arizona, I was hiking through a slot canyon called Waterholes Canyon near Page, Arizona, just down the road from Horseshoe Bend, when I found myself without the use of my widest lens for my Fuji GFX 50S camera. A couple of shots near the beginning of my hike was all I got before the lens effectively froze up and ceased functioning. Because I was packing light, I didn’t have my Nikon kit with me, which meant that all I had in the way of functioning lenses for the Fuji was my 120mm macro lens. Way too wide for shooting the narrow canyon itself, I decided to focus instead on whatever details I could discover along the hike.
The patch of light-colored sand on the darker sandstone canyon floor is one such scene I found. The wind which constantly whips through the canyon had deposited a sinuous trail of sand in a shallow depression in the darker sandstone floor of the canyon. I particularly like the small ridges apparently carved by water in the many flash floods that rip through this canyon.
The light in this scene is reflected light bouncing off the canyon wall behind me as I’m aiming my camera and lens straight down for this image.
Because the lens was only a few feet above the sand for this image, and because the depth of the scene covered a span of a few inches, I shot this image at f/32 in an attempt to carry enough depth-of-field to keep everything in focus. The exposure was 1/4 of a second @ ISO 400.
