January 16, 2021

Sedona, Arizona

January 17, 2021

Yesterday was a beautiful day in Sedona. I took my lounge chair up to Upper Red Rock Loop and set up camp at an overlook. I was there from noon until almost 6 pm. In addition to taking photos, I was practicing just being. My mind was telling my body that we should go on a hike, go do laundry -- that I was wasting my time by doing this "just being" malarkey. Fortunately I hung in there, my mind finally relented and I spent a peaceful few hours watching the sun move across the sky.

Later in the afternoon I met a great couple - Mandy and Zach - from Telluride. They had wonderful stories about their travels -- just back from two months in Kauai. Wow! We swapped tales about sleeping in our trucks -- their stories were better than mine -- and they shared the hikes they had been on in Sedona (I've been a relative slug). Mandy said she has hiked all 14ers in Colorado (impressive!), and we talked about what qualifies as visiting a place (e.g., just being there, hiking there, staying overnight -- not sure we came to a conclusion). Their enthusiasm for life and adventure was amazing -- very inspiring. If I get back to Telluride I will need to look them up.

Again, I tried to limit the number of photos that made the Show, but I fear there is probably some overkill in the slideshow. Over my six hours of shooting, I experimented with and without my CPL polarizer (still an amateur), a number of settings on the camera (what is this landscape mode under Picture Control?) and the use of foreground. I trashed more photos than I put in the slideshow if that tells you anything. My lessons from the afternoon? Thank goodness I am not shooting film, and I'm coming to accept that it is ok to enhance photos through post processing. Tweaking the lighting is key for me. But I am still not ready to tackle advanced post processing software.