I visited Arches National Park near Moab, Utah twice in 2001 (and again in 2011 and 2015). It is a wildly popular park full of wild formations, notably the many rock arches. From the iconic Delicate Arch to Turret Arch, Double Arch, the Windows, and formations like Balanced Rock.
My first visit was in May, 2001 and there were wildflowers in abundance. My second visit was in November of that year and only a few autumn colors in the sparse vegetation remained.
All the images below were made on Velvia film with my trusy Nikon N90 camera. I have digitized a selection of slides made on this trip using my Nikon D850 digital camera, fitted with a Nikon 60mm macro lens and Nikon ES-2 slide adaptor, creating 45MByte image of each slide. I’ve then post-processed each image as usual in Lightroom, Photoshop, and (occasionally) ON-1 Photo Raw 2020.
Velvia film was famous for creating deeply saturated colors with a bias to the reds. I think that even though these images are digitized you can still see some of the “analog smoothness” that film creates as opposed to digital. Sort of like vinyl records compared to digital CDs.
I have transformed several of the images in the gallery above to black and white—which to my mind allows us to focus on the unique shapes and shadows of these rugged formations.
