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One of the coolest locations that we have ever visited during our many trips to the American southwest is the false kiva at Canyonlands National Park. The trail to this beautiful location is barely marked and is almost impossible to find. We met two other hikers on our quest to find the trail who gave up and went back to their cars. Once we found a couple of trail cairns we were overjoyed but soon it looked like the trail dropped off a canyon cliff. It took me about 20 minutes to finally figure out that the trail actually turns sharply right from the cliff and while it looks daunting from the top its actually not the hardest part of the trail. The hardest part came when we had to navigate a bit of a boulder meadow full of rocks the size of a smart car. It took us way more time than we planned to get over the boulder field and finally to climb to the small cave that contains the false kiva.
While the trail was hard and difficult to navigate, the view from the kiva more than made up for the difficulties we experienced. While we didn’t quite stay till the full sunset, I got this shot with some fantastic details of the kiva and some great colors in the sky. Technically I find cave shots to be one of the hardest shots that I have to take and this image, not an exception. I had a hard time balancing the bright sky with the darkness of the cave and the false kiva. So this image is a composite of three images. The first one was taken to show off details of the cave and the second one with a 2 stop nd grad and exposing for the sky and the sunset and a third image where I did average metering of the whole scene with a bit of exposure compensation added to get the histogram correct. I blended my three images using a bit of exposure blending techniques by incorporating luminosity masks rather than using an HDR software. I think I am much more satisfied with luminosity masking than most HDR software that I have used.