Eruption of Light (Deux) by BodhiSmith

This is a new revision of an composition captured in February of 2012, which was taken when I used to be with Olympus using with their lightweight e410 (12.3mp crop-sensor DSLR). To this day, this is still far-and-away one of my most popular compositions with my customers. This is Mesa Arch, a truly over-photographed iconic spot of the American Southwest. It has been taken so many millions of times, but all too often in the same manner. As photogs get greedy and want it all: the arch, the sun, the sky, clouds, the formations in the canyon below--they end up creating a composition where the Arch becomes a simple window to the canyon below and skies above. This truly devalues the arch in their compositions and muddles the reason why they made a pilgrimage to this spot in the first place--the incandescent glow of this famous arch at sunrise. My goal with this image was to capture Mesa Arch in its full glowing glory. I was there in the freezing cold of pre-dawn to capture this arch at sunrise, not to treat it as a window as many other photographers have wrongly done in the past (IMHO). I wanted to isolate my subject (the arch itself) and de-emphasize everything else (the rock formations in the canyon below and the rising sun/sky above). This composition is actually 6 images stitched together using PhotoMerge in Adobe Photoshop CS6 in order to create one large high resolution panoramic image that can be printed to very large sizes. I used two specific anchor points in the background to piece the six images together seamlessly...which was also easier since nothing in the image is moving, except the light itself... I used a longer exposure of 8 seconds for each of the six images so as to saturate as much of the glowing red rock of the arch as I could in each piece. Plus, I went as wide as I could with 14mm to give me the most options to correctly stitch the composition together. I chose a f/stop of f/22 at ISO-100 while using inverted .9 ND grad filters to keep the image from blowing out in the canyon below and balance rocks in the foreground with the glowing rocks above. For this new version, I included the sunburst and brought the entire composition down a smidgeon so as to give the composition a bit of a face-lift, as well as to supply clients of mine with another alternative for this cornerstone image of mine that they love so much. Hope you like it, and that your for taking the time to explore my photography. peace, D."Bodhi" http://500px.com/photo/70406629