I took the featured photograph within the Capitol Reef Nationwide Park in Utah.
The Capitol Reef is the least visited nationwide park in Utah. It’s situated fairly far-off from main southwest cities and, consequently, attracts fewer vacationers.
The space to Capitol Reef from Las Vegas is 550km, 800km from Phoenix, and 700km from Denver.
Nonetheless, the park is filled with vacationers throughout the excessive season, from Might to October.
However for folks, preferring secluded places, like me, there may be at all times Cathedral Valley.
The valley is situated additional away from the most important park’s points of interest, and the one method to get there may be by driving 50km of ruff and twisted grime street. Plus, to get there, it’s essential ford the Fermont river. It’s not an enormous deal within the dry season, however after heavy rain or flash flood, it may be a difficulty.
The Cathedral Vally street loop is 92km lengthy, and more often than not, you don’t want a 4×4 automobile, however you completely want a high-clearance one. Additionally, you want Capitol Reef Map.
In the midst of the Cathedral Vally loop, there’s a primitive (free) campground situated at 2200m above sea degree, and it gives implausible views on Cathedral Valley.
I took the featured photograph 50m from our tenting spot.

Taking pictures
In the present day, I wish to share my new strategy to getting the optimum publicity for my pictures. I’ve been testing the brand new strategy since switching to Fujifilm cameras and lenses.
The brand new methodology is predicated on the premise that to get most high quality from the digital camera sensor (any model, any mannequin), it’s essential maximize sensor saturation with gentle. The concept is to not get proper publicity in-camera however moderately to seize as a lot gentle as potential with out clipping the highlights. And also you deal with the ultimate publicity changes in Lightroom or some other RAW editor.
I first got here throughout this strategy whereas watching YouTube channel Theoria Apophasis by Ken Wheeler, aka Offended Photographer. After studying some extra technical data, I used to be satisfied that it was the suitable strategy for my images. Over a 12 months, I carried out the brand new approach into my workflow. Because of this, most of my newest pictures are overexposed by 1/3 or 1/2 stops.
Under is the histogram of the featured photograph. It’s overexposed by 1/2 stops.


Within the case of the featured photograph, the capturing was straight ahead. I had my digital camera on the tripod, and the setting solar was behind me, illuminating the valley with the mushy gentle. I had no downside capturing the dynamic vary of the scene with one shot. Bracketing was not mandatory.
Enhancing & Processing
It was a single RAW processing workflow.
Lightroom (70%)
I stored the unique side ratio (3 x 2) however I needed to crop the picture barely to make composition tighter and to align the main line of the street with the underside left nook.
Subsequent, I
The Lightroom Preset Enhancing Components: Napa (5, 10, 13, 16, 20, 32)
Photoshop (30%)
In Photoshop, all I needed to do was to spice up particulars and scale back digital noise. Plus, I needed to do some cleansing through the use of the Spot Removing instrument.
Plugins: DeNoise AI (noise discount).
Complete Time: 15min
Earlier than & After Transformation



