Sunset Mather Point

Grand Canyon at Mather Point, standing in the middle of at least 100 people, most of them shooting with their I-phones, trying to capture the whole vista on a 2" screen. Of course there are a few shooting with tripod and high end Canons, as there always are at the Canyon. It's a bit uncomfortable trying to muscle your way in for your own shot. I didn't have enough room to use my tripod, but I was able to get a decent shot. No vibration that I could detect in the image. Rangefinders (my Leica M9) are a bit more forgiving as far as shooting in low light at a slow shutter speed, since the rangefinders do not have a mirror like DSLR's, which cause a lot of vibration at slower shutter speeds, say at less than 1/45 seconds. Shooting with a DSLR with this kind of light necessitates using a tripod and usually a cable release. The light level when I took this shot was very low. Using an ISO value of 400, I was able to get this exposure at 1/45 second at f13. However, the bottom 2/3 of the frame was very dark in the raw file. Using Photoshop, and the fact that it was a raw file, I was able to extract the colours in the bottom of the frame. Raw files enable you to extract an amazing amount of information and data that normally would be lost in a jpeg. I made the mistake once in Yellowstone, shooting with my Nikon all in jpeg mode rather than raw. When I started to process the images, I realized my mistake. A lot of images were over or under exposed that I probably could have recovered had I shot them in raw mode. Most of the images that had a broad dynamic range were not recoverable. I guess you learn by making mistakes.