Neal Grosskopf
Bryce Canyon National Park – Amphitheater
Before & After
Here’s a shot of Inspiration Point at Bryce Canyon National Park. This was from my visit last April during my wedding out in Las Vegas. This is one of those rare shots where I did 100% of the editing in Lightroom as I had a pretty even exposure and didn’t need any advanced features that Photoshop offers.
Location
Like I mentioned earlier, this is taken at the lookout near Inspiration Point. There’s a walkway you can go out on that gives you a nice view of the amphitheater. Like my previous visit at Bryce Canyon it was pretty cold here this time. Bryce is at a high elevation so it always is colder than most the other places I visit in Utah, usually by 20 degrees. We drove to Bryce from Vegas and also hit up Zion in the same day. It was a lot of driving but was worth it since we’re not out that way often.
Composition
I was lucky that the clouds covered up the sun halfway through my visit at Bryce Canyon. They were out earlier and casting heavy shadows on parts of the canyon. A large cloud was working its way overhead and finally covered up the sun, giving me an even light scene. I tried to compose my shots with the amphitheater in the background. Some of my other shots had trees or other objects in the foreground. This shot didn’t have much in the foreground so I cropped it by about 25% to get the large pillar rock closer. That is one nice thing about the 42 megapixels with the Sony A7RII is if you hit the focus correct, you can crop in a fair amount and compose the scene later.
EXIF Information
Post Processing
Software Used
- Lightroom
This is one of the few images that I only needed Lightroom to edit it. Since the sun was covered by clouds, there weren’t any harsh highlights or shadows in my original scene so I didn’t need to use HDR to even things out. For the most part I wanted the beautiful hoodoos in the amphitheater so most of my edits were to get people’s eyes to look there more than other areas of the scene. Overall I’m really happy with this image, besides some of my cityscapes in Las Vegas, this is one of my favorites from my desert hikes during this trip.