This was my fifth and final image of the five day black and white challenge on a social media site. I hiked 3.3 miles to the narrows of the West Fork trail in Oak Creek Canyon near Sedona, AZ for the first time this fall. Normally at this point the water is knee to waist-high and you have to swim to continue on the trail. This year the water is barely a stream and you can walk quite far into the canyon after the maintained trail ends. It was midday with harsh light not suitable for landscape photography. As I looked around the vast canyon walls with varying shades of red, the texture and dancing light caught my eye.
I had challenged myself to using my 50 mm 1.8 lens and chose to use it for some close-up images. The reflected light off the stream was rhythmically moving and emphasizing the texture on the canyon walls. I briefly considered switching to my 105 mm 2.8 macro lens and decided against it. Why? With a macro lens, your depth of field is so minute that in order to capture all of the texture I would have had to stop down to F25 or smaller. With such a small aperture, diffraction was a concern. What about focus stacking? With the light movement on the canyon walls, each image would be different making focus stacking not a viable option. I chose to stick with my 50 mm 1.8 lens as I knew the depth of field would be greater without using a tiny aperture. The technical information for the image below: F8, ISO 200 1/5 sec with a circular polarizer.
This image is in the Monochrome Madness #37 gallery on Leanne Cole PHOTOGRAPHY with photos from around the world.
Different Isn't Wrong, It's Just Different 