Photo copyright Parker Munsch
For this image, I wanted to get the red cliffs in Sedona, AZ. So I drove down to Sedona on a Sunday and took some pictures of them and other parts of the scenery. The photo shown is one of the other scenery photos taken. For this photo, I walked to the top of a parking garage just off of the main road in Sedona, and I just started taking pictures of all the scenery I could get. I thought this image ended up being the best picture I got because it had the best ratio of the mountains and the bottom parts of shrubs and trees. I really like nature so the great scenery of Sedona inspired me to do this photo. I do not think I was trying to say anything with this photo; I just really liked the scenery and wanted to take a picture to remember the beautiful view I had at the top of the parking garage. In terms of thought process for this image I ended up using the height of the parking garage as a good vantage point so it could almost look like it was the edge of the valley, which it sort of is there. For this image I had no filter on the end of the lens. I was using my Nikon D5200 camera, with an 18-200 millimeter 3.5-5.6, which was just zoomed in to 38 millimeters. When shooting the image my aperture was at f/14 my ISO was at 250 and the shutter went off at 1/100. It was a bright day so I wanted the ISO to be lower so I would not get any noise. I had my f-stop so high so I could get the full focal range I needed for the image. It was not until days after taking the photo that I decided to put it into black and white. At first the sky was a little bit duller than I would like it to be, however I liked the tones everywhere else. So after toying with the saturation and the vibrancy, in adobe Lightroom I ended up putting the sliders all the way down to the left so it became black and white. I cropped in the image a little bit from the right, because there was a distracting part on the end that took away from the image so I cropped it in and that is my final product.
About the Photographer:
My name is Parker Munsch. I am a photography and criminal justice major at Northern Arizona University. I have been legitimately taking pictures for a year and a half now, but before that I was interested in the backgrounds of the images, like how it was shot and what editing went into the image. I prefer landscape photography, because I love the outdoors and like taking photos when I am in a cool new place. I really do not like to do much in post usually I just play with the tones and saturation. I try to do pictures that I like and the outdoors is an area that is very inspirational to me.
To read more about the Northern Arizona University “Behind the Image: Guest Blogger” project on our blog, please read the introduction at http://youcansleepwhenyouredead.com/wordpress/3rd-annual-northern-arizona-university-behind-the-image-guest-blogger-project/. Please take a minute to leave your insights and constructive comments in the Comment section below – the student would love to hear from you!