This photograph was taken on May 4, 2018 on the Grand Canyon’s Tonto Trail just to the east of Hermit Creek, a place I have enjoyed visiting since 1984. The view is across the Colorado River to the “Redwall” cliffs on the river’s north side. The near cliff, across the river, is about 2 miles away and the far cliffs across the river are about 5 miles away from me. To be down in this area, looking across the river like this, gives one a transcendent awareness of the size of the Grand Canyon. These distant cliffs are 5 miles away, yet the Grand Canyon is over 277 miles long. One is only seeing a tiny portion of its grandeur here.
Photographing such a view, at dusk, is difficult because of the great contrast in the scene. It is simply not possible, in one frame, to capture detail simultaneously in brightly and dimly lit portions of a subject. Indeed, below please see a single exposure made at the time, which properly exposes the background of the cliff walls across the river, but which greatly underexposes the pleasant area where I was walking with my friends Keven Siegert and Greg Kilroy. It very much looked like that across the river, but it certainly was not black like this where we were walking.
The way one can handle such a challenge is to take several exposures, which let different amounts of light into the camera’s sensor. In this instance, 5 exposures were taken, and the brightest exposure was 32 times as strong as the dimmest exposure. These different images are then combined in a computer, so that the detail of all the exposures can be revealed in one image. Such an image can much more faithfully represent what the Eye and Mind see — as the Eye and Mind can perceive and comprehend much more contrast than can a camera. This technique is usually referred to as “HDR,” which stands for HIgh Dynamic Range photography.