This is Horseshoe Bend, a famous 360-degree turn in the Colorado River near Page, Arizona. It costs ten dollars to get in, and I spent $30 so that I could see it three times: in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening. In the morning and the afternoon the shadows are pretty heavy this time of year, but in the evening you can get a good shot as long as you use a tripod and set a fairly long shutter speed.

This picture is a 4-segment panorama taken a few minutes after sundown. It took a fair amount of effort to get Photoshop to stitch this into a single image properly, but eventually everything came together. At the bottom center you can see a group of rafters who had stopped for the evening to camp at the base of the rock.

I’ve been playing around with converting some of my Arizona pictures to black and white. I’ve never been especially good at this, but Arizona provides a pretty good backdrop for practice. The black-and-white version of Horseshoe Bend is at the bottom.

January 26, 2020 — Page, Arizona

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The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

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