Last week I traveled north to Sedona, a 2-hour trip north from Scottsdale. I was accompanied by Barry Stewart and Alex Skoczen for an overnight photo shoot amid the red rocks of the Sedona area.
We began in the early evening at a location just north of the Village of Oak Creek. It’s an area surrounded by peaks stretching along the Red Rock Scenic Byway between Oak Creek and Sedona. This first scene features the Courthouse Butte, with its warm colours on display at sunset.
This is one of the area’s best known peaks, know as Bell Rock, the name taken from its bell-like shape. It is very popular for hiking, with a path spiralling up and around the rock’s perimeter.
From this same area, I took this next picture just after sunset, looking eastward toward a ridge fronting the Munds Mountain Wilderness.
This is the same ridge taken about twenty minutes later, soon after the sun had gone down. I was in a different location and used a greater focal length to zoom in closer for a better view of the detail and colours of the rock.
Again, from the same area but looking toward the north. This photograph was captured just moments before the sun set. You can see the the last rays of light striking the rock on the right side of the scene. The light changes quickly as sunset approaches and you can observe the differences in colour of the rock in these five photographs all taken within a period of 25 minutes.
Once we had completed our sunset shoot, we retired to our lodgings to get some shut-eye before our next outing, later on. We got up and went back out at about 1:30 am to do some night photographs. Our first stop was just north of Bell Rock where we had been earlier. The Milky Way has made its appearance, rising just above the rock. Without light on the rock, there was very little colour, so I converted this image to black and white.
From here, we moved on to an area to the east of Sedona on the Schnebly Hill Road. This was a great location for photographing the Milky Way, very dark. Our timing was perfect (slightly past 3:00 am) to capture the galactic centre of the constellation in the gap between two peaks of the ridge on the opposite side of the road. The ridge was partially illuminated with light coming from the Town of Sedona behind us, casting a warm glow on the rocks above us. We even had a parking lot, where we could take the pictures.
This is another version of the same scene, taken in landscape orientation and converted to black and white. All of my Milky Way photographs were taken with a 15 second exposure, using a 24 mm prime lens with an aperture setting of f/1.4 and ISO settings ranging from 1600 to 2500.
We called it a night around 4:00 am and went back to bed for awhile before getting some breakfast and returning to Scottsdale.