Tuesday, July 08, 2025 | By: Jim Zuckerman
This is the most iconic shot of Canyonlands National Park. It is Mesa Arch at sunrise. I've not been back here for years -- I shot this in the 90's with a medium format film camera, the Mamiya 7 -- but I've heard there are now too many people there every morning to take this shot. What most photographers want is to capture the incredible glow on the underside of the arch. The experience I had of solitude and beauty is hard to come by now. Perhaps in the winter you can still experience that when most of the tourists have gone. I used a 43mm wide angle lens (equivalent to about a 21mm in the full frame digital format we now use), and my settings were unrecorded. But for all my landscape work back then, I used f/32 for complete depth of field. I always used a tripod, too, which meant a slow shutter was fine. For all non-moving subjects -- landscapes, architecture, etc. -- I consistently used Fujichrome Velvia 50. To digitize the image, I scanned the 6x7cm transparency with a high-end Imacon scanner.
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