Antelope Canyon - Page, Arizona – Gregory Boratyn

Gregory’ Boratyn’s Website: http://www.eveningphotography.com/

I took this shot in Antelope Canyon, Arizona in summer of 2010. 

I think there are more than two of them there, but the most popular ones are called Lower and Upper Antelope Canyons, sometimes called Antelope Slot Canyons.

Since this was my first trip there I didn’t have preferences which one I’d go to, they both have a lot to offer so I selected the Lower one.

The place in the summer time is enormously occupied. I’ve never seen so many tourists from Japan or Europe visiting it. It was difficult to find a spot to set up my tripod and find my composition because someone was always in the frame or in the spot I’d like to be. I actually paid $50 (normal price is $35) for photography tour, yet it was very difficult to even walk through the canyon with so many people around. However, I did manage to shot some keepers, and the picture you see here is one of them. 

I think we all agree that pictures of Antelope Canyon are popular and one can find millions of them on the Internet. They are all very nice but also very similar, so I figured I’ll make my picture different, and process it somewhat differently so it stands out.

First, I decided to make it monochrome. I converted it to black and white using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 plugins. It looked rather boring, so I added a bit of blue tonality to it making it more interesting. I smoothed out the structure of the rock a bit using Oil Paint filter built into the Photoshop. I set stylization to 10, and cleanliness to 10, and left everything else at 0. I applied vignette effect using Melancholytron plugins for Photoshop as well.

After all that processing I used Nik Viveza 2 plugins to bring some of the structure back that got lost when Oil Paint filter was applied. This also gave the pic an HDR appearance but it’s not an HDR image. Lastly I sharpen it using unsharp mask. I set radius to 0.2 pixel and amount to 500 for the full size (12MP) picture.  For smaller pictures I normally set amount to 250. 

I liked the effect so I decided to resize it to 1200 by 900 pixels and post it here.

Enjoy,

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