The fantastic formations around Moab Utah are not confined to Arches National Park. Canyonlands National Park encompasses a far greater area t the southwest of Arches. IN addition there is the Green River Overlook and the wonderfully-named Dead Horse Point State Park, with its view of a Colorado River horseshoe bend.
I have been to Canyonlands and surrounding area twice—first in 2001 when these images were made and again in 2015 in the company of my son, Geoff, brother-in-law, Greg, and nephews, Mike and Alex. There is nothing quite like watching the sun come up at Grandview point and seeing the incredible canyons a thousand feet below revealed out of the shadows.
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.
