Yavapai County

• Andy Warhol.

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After a long time of all work and no play, we finally managed to get some time off from work and coupled with the thanksgiving day holidays had a decent enough time to plan another photo trip. This time like last year we chose the South West.

On the first day of our trip we basically drove straight to Sedona, AZ and to the Cathedral Rocks vista. We spend a lovely evening walking around the park and scouting locations for the evening shoot. As the sun started to go down we had amazing light hitting the rocks with some beautiful foreground interests all over the park.

This view particularly caught my interest with the beautiful rustic barn in the foreground with the cathedral rocks forming an interesting albeit distant background. I used my tele lens to compress the distance a bit and stitched three shots to get this image. I swear I will never get tired of the incredible red of the rocks set against the beautiful blue skies.

Thanks for visiting more pics to follow..

I arrived at Watson Lake to see a beautiful pink sunset. After the sun set, the rocks seemed to start to glow, giving another great view. I returned next morning for a beautiful sunrise and waited around for golden morning hour. So I ended up with 4 pictures which I will post here over the next few days, and wonder which one gets your preference.

The second picture, which was taken not long after the first one, however, the colors in the sky and also the reflection had totally changed.

I arrived at Watson Lake to see a beautiful pink sunset. After the sun set, the rocks seemed to start to glow, giving another great view. I returned next morning for a beautiful sunrise and waited around for golden morning hour. So I ended up with 4 pictures which I will post here over the next few days, and wonder which one gets your preference.

• Anton Chekhov.

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Sedona, Arizona has often been associated with spiritual energy and other benefits of the supernatural realm, that’s a bit above my capability to understand. What attracted me to Sedona was the desert landscape and the amazing sunsets that happens routinely here. So, when we decided to make a trip to Sedona, I wanted to cover the Cathedral Rock from as many viewpoints as possible.

Most of the viewpoint is located near the crescent moon ranch but the best photo from the trip came from a roadside pullout. We were late getting to a viewpoint and en-route I saw a good view of the Cathedral Rocks and I decided to opt for the roadside pullout rather than the planned viewpoint. The decision was driven by some of the best light that I have seen in a while. The foreground was a bit busy, but I believe the subject and the light more than made up for it.

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I never was here before, i found the place from someones upload here on Flickr and thought it might look interesting to visit. And although on...

• George Eliot.

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Another shot of the stunningly beautiful cathedral rocks of Sedona, AZ. This was taken at the same park from where I took the previously posted shot but this is the more classical location. A local photographer who was there told me that we missed out on fall colors by a week and that the trees framing the rocks still had some color till about 3 days ago.

News like this used to depress me not so long time ago and I usually go on a tirade blaming everyone in the universe for my bad luck, but thankfully these days I just resolve to visit the place again and I am sure my wife is thankful for that change. She used to have to endure my rants. Anyways this is one of my favorite shots from the trip. Hope you all enjoy it.

• Kin Hubbard.

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While living in LA, we were spoiled by the abundance of stunning locations nearby. There were tons of national and state parks a short drive away and some location that could easily be national parks as well. So, when someone mentioned about a little town called Sedona near the Grand Canyon national park, it didn’t immediately climb to the top of the list. But it piqued our interest enough to be added into our next trip to the Grand Canyon’s south rim. I only did cursory research about the place, and most of it resulted in the image of cathedral rocks and the sliding rock state park which provides some stunning vistas of these beautiful rock formations. We only had an afternoon allocated for the park and had to leave immediately after sunset to get to our hotel near Grand Canyon NP.

As soon we got near Sedona, we knew that we made a mistake, the place was just beautiful with stunning rock formations everywhere we looked. Fall had passed, but there were still some remnants of fall colors lingered on some of the more stubborn trees. We explored the small park on foot till the sunset. And as soon as the light started to warm up, we headed to our sunset spot. I picked this spot for the sunset shot due to the rather sill pool of water on the slick rock, but during sunset, the whole stream was rather calm providing a spectacular reflection of the rock formation with some nice trees on both sides completing the composition.

After the colorful morning sky, the sun rose and the boulders turned golden in the early light.

I arrived at Watson Lake to see a beautiful pink sunset. After the sun set, the rocks seemed to start to glow, giving another great view. I returned next morning for a beautiful sunrise and waited around for golden morning hour. So I ended up with 4 pictures which I will post here over the next few days, and wonder which one gets your preference.

• Saint Augustine.

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Took this shot while we were actually driving back from crescent moon picnic area. I noticed this beautiful glow in the sky after sunset. So when we came across a scenic view area I pulled over and realized there was a beautiful panoramic view of the famed cathedral rocks area.

Since I had all my gear out anyway I tried to stitch together a panorama shot. It was a bit hard as the light was fading fast and I had to do all my setting up real fast and churn the shots out quickly. This can be a problem with D800 as it takes time to “think” sometimes and take ups a lot to time writing an image to the cf card once its buffer is full. In spite of all that the shot came out good and I was really happy how it looked on my monitor. Hope you all like it, thanks for visiting my stream.

I should thank Michael Wilson for introducing me to this awesome location near Prescott, AZ. Watson Lake is an awesome location if you are into...

One of the amazing places in the American Southwest! This is the vista from Oak Creek. Wading through the shallow water was required to capture this great view.

The next morning I returned to the same spot. It was pitch dark when I arrived at the entrance, only to find the gate was still locked. I started to panic, but within 5 minutes a ranger appeared, to open the gate, mumbling "I didn't realize people were so anxious to get into the park". The car was parked and I was really glad I brought a headlamp to find my way again over those boulders. I arrived at the same spot and was rewarded with a warm and colorful Sunrise.

I arrived at Watson Lake to see a beautiful pink sunset. After the sun set, the rocks seemed to start to glow, giving another great view. I returned next morning for a beautiful sunrise and waited around for golden morning hour. So I ended up with 4 pictures which I will post here over the next few days, and wonder which one gets your preference.

[#13 on explore 12/03/17]

• David Icke.

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Another shot of the beautiful Cathedral Rocks from Sedona, Arizona. I took this shot after we left from the Crescent Moon Picnic Area and on our drive up to Page AZ. We came across this location totally by accident, but that didn’t take away how stunning the view was. I saw the amazing afterglow of the sunset and then saw this tree perfectly framing the rocks far away. So assembled my gear fast and positioned myself right behind the tree and user a wide-angle lens and HDR to get best dynamic range possible.

This is a 15 shot stitch panorama made real fast before I lost the light. Hope you all like it.