We spent the week at the Grand Canyon. I made a reservation six months ago in the hopes that I would catch the monsoon storms that typically come through the region in late July and August. It’s hard to guess the weather six months in advance. As it turned out, there was a warning posted by the National Weather Service for excessive heat in the southwestern United States. St. George, Utah hit 112° almost every day this week. We were on the North Rim however, where the daytime air temperature was a pleasant 85°. While we didn’t witness the storm activity I was hoping for, there was still enough cloud cover to make for interesting photographs and I shot several lovely sunsets and one very nice sunrise. My shooting during the day was under harsh lighting conditions. I got a few decent mid-day photographs, but they will need to be rendered in black and white to look nice.

I’m still practicing the proper exposure balance between foreground and an evening or morning sky. Most of these images were made using a 3-stop hard edge graduated neutral density filter. We watched a thunderstorm across the canyon on the south rim one of the evenings. Since I also added a 10-stop ND filter to blur the motion of the clouds, I was hopeful to capture some lightning strikes. During the 8-minute exposures, I recorded several bolts of lightning, but they didn’t push through the exposure well. When I zoom in, I can see them. On the other hand, I had a lot of noise show up in the image. Now I need to study how to eliminate noise on these long exposures.

The Scamp trailer was a joy to live in and it met our expectations in every way. We laughed to ourselves several times at the juxtaposition of our little compact trailer surrounded by the mammoth 5th wheelers parked around us. The sleeping arrangement is a little tight, but we like each other enough to snuggle the night away. It will take a while to make it feel like home. I think we have ample storage. It’s just a matter of figuring out what all is needed, and then where to put it.