LOWER ANTELOPE CANYON

Lower Antelope Canyon is located east of Page, AZ, on route 98.  This is the one of the best canyons for dramatic rock sculptures and extreme colorations.  It is also one of the most photographed and popular.  There is an entry fee (of about $20) and the station is manned by the Young family on a pretty regular basis.  This canyon was the scene of the most serious canyoneering disaster in US history, when, in August of 1997, 11 tourists lost their lives in a flash flood.  They made the fatal mistake of re-entering the canyon upon observing a thunderstorm cell some 8 miles away, thinking it too far off to flash Antelope Canyon.  Of course the time for the flood to travel depends significantly on terrain, slope, sinuosity, etc.  In White Canyon, for example, it can take a dozen  hours for rains at Natural Bridges Monument to reach the narrows of the Black Hole.  Here it only took a couple hours and the tourists were trapped and washed away. 

To photograph in Antelope you must have a tripod, a mechanical cable or even better an electronic cable release, a good exposure meter capable of reading low light levels, and considerable patience with other photographers and tourists, the latter who often just want to run through.  Long exposures are the rule.  You want depth of field (f11) and saturated color, so this combines to give exposure times order 10 to 100 seconds.  Avoid direct sunlight on the rocks, as it will just burn a hole in your picture or force your in-camera exposure meter to darken all the surrounding walls.  Take a lot of film, there is none at the site, and bracket exposures on your best shots in order to guarantee a keeper.  For example, if my meter suggests 20 seconds, I will shoot a series at 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40 seconds.  This covers any reciprocity problems and gives a selection that will usually insure a pleasing image.  With a spot meter you can use the zone system, but I would still bracket in threes, say 15, 20, 30 for the above example.  Pre-fogging the film to decrease contrast and increase the range of illumination that can be retained in the details has also been done.  This is pretty tedious with 3D because both slides have to be done exactly the same way, a difficult undertaking.  Hopefully, someday, a low noise digital camera will become useful for such things.  Unfortunately most consumer, and even most professional digital cameras, don't function very well in low light.

Take a tripod (again).  I have seen people frustrated that they visit this area and immediately discover they can't hand hold a picture.  They then use flash, which has a terrible far-field fall off (like the inverse square of the distance) and which washes out all the subtle multi-reflected colors.