Fallen Rainbow, Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada

I wanted to share two images today. Both were captured in Valley of Fire State Park, an amazing area of colorful sandstone, monoliths and canyons, east of Las Vegas by about 1 hour.  As with most locations, the best stuff is usually tucked away, hidden from obvious view.  One must get out of there car, and walk across the landscape, into the washes, up and over the hills to begin to really experience the true grander and depth of color and shape this place has to offer.  The fist image below is the very first image i took over a 12 day trip this past November. I arrived in Vegas at noon, picked up my rental and got the hell out of Dodge as fast as possible. Vegas is really only good for one thing, flying in and out of it! I arrived in Valley of Fire under some really dramatic clouds and was hoping to catch some sweet light and nice clouds at the Fire Wave for sunset. I walked out into the sandstone and arrived at the wave like formation about 2 hours pre-sunset. I waned to spend some time studying the land and looking for the best composition. I noticed the clouds beginning to dissipate to the west, so I started shooting early knowing I was gonna convert the image to BW.

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The color version is also very strong. This image was processed of of a single RAW file. I double processed the RAW file in order to achieve the color tone for the sandstone, and still maintain a rich, but not overly saturated blue sky. The clouds really pull the image together in both the BW and color renditions.

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Finally on the last morning of the trip, I doubled back to Valley of Fire State Park, having an early morning flight the next morning I would be spending the night at a hotel of the strip in Vegas. I had spotted this incredibly colorful small wash while looking for the Fire Wave on my first day. When I passed through it the first time around, the sun was too far in the West to cast any bounce light. On my last morning I made a special trip to this location to catch the bounce light which is what is illuminating and painting the warm and cool tones into this image (just the same as shooting in a slot canyon). What was so interesting, and something that I had not thought would happen is the right side of the wash was catching a strong warm bounce light from the red and yellow sandstone wall above to the left and the sandstone on the left was in a deeper shade. This shifted the color tone cool. I shot two images for the final. The first set at daylight balance to record the warm tones on the right and the second shot at 3800K to render the sandstone a very cool blue/magenta on the left. The two images were later combined using Photoshop.

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