Photo-adventuring in Monument Valley

By the Dawn's Early Light

"Stupid mistake."

That's no instructor berating me; the accusation is staring out from page three of my rain-splattered notebook. I wrote it. It's there to remind me that I ruined the first 10 frames I shot of that stormy sunset at Monument Valley. Got in a hurry, didn't think through the photographic problems. Aperture too wide; foreground arch not within the depth-of-field.

"F.A.S.T."

That's in the notebook, too, a few pages later, advice from Kodak rep David Hoffman, one of the professional photographers on this trip. "It's an acronym I ran across years ago," he told me. "It stands for Focus, Aperture, Shutter, Think. I've found it helpful."

I do, too now that I've burned it into my brain.

"Helpful" would be a good word for this entire trip, one of Arizona Highways' several Photo Tours of the year. "Challenging" would be another. Monument Valley is one of the most frequently photographed natural spectacles in North America, so I feel pressured to come up with some fresh images, to capture some bit of this awesome landscape in a new light. This is a towering burden. One of my photo companions studies a boulder I'm about to incorporate in my foreground composition. "That's the Ansel Adams rock, isn't it?" He isn't kidding.For those likely to be tormented by competition with Ansel & Company, fortunately, there are Photo Tours to Arizona attractions that have enjoyed less exposure. Since their beginning in 1988, these excursions have taken photography enthusiasts to Canyon de Chelly, the White Mountains, the Chiricahua Mountains, and Sedona-Oak Creek. More tours (LEFT) Storm clouds rolling above sandstone pinnacles in Monument Valley promise the kind of "perfect" weather that participants in a Photo Tour hope to encounter. Right Mitten Butte is on the right. (ABOVE) Sleeping late could mean losing the photo opportunity of a lifetime, something our tour members weren't willing to risk. Here a couple of early birds prepare to capture a sunrise near the park visitors center.

An intrepid group of amateur photographers mingles with the pros in Monument Valley, hoping for a picture "brilliantly original."

are in the works. And there's something for everyone casual to expert photographers.

Arizona Highways isn't involved directly with the tours. They're conducted by the Friends of Arizona Highways, a nonprofit foundation. Explains John Drew, president of the Friends, "The purpose of the tours is to help fulfill the mission of Arizona Highways itself: to promote tourism to and through Arizona. We take people to places they've wanted to go all their lives and teach them some photography."

A Friends volunteer assists the group's Travel Desk coordinator in planning and leading tours, but the teaching is done by professional photographers whose work will be familiar to Arizona Highways readers. Jerry Jacka, Jack Dykinga, Peter Mortimer, Jerry Sieve, Peter Kresan, Christine Keith, Jim Tallon, Peter Bloomer, Ray Manley, and P. K. Weis all have conducted tours. The instruction is convivial and informal. The pro suggests good shots, warns of photographic hazards, and answers questions. The more courageous participants bring slides or prints for a lateevening critique, where our stupid mistakes politer words are always used are pointed out for the benefit and amusement of all.

This Monument Valley tour has even more than the usual quota of expertise on board. The pro is Gary Ladd, a superb scenic photographer, who lives just below the Utah border in Page, Arizona, and two Kodak reps from Phoenix: Hoffman and Relf Drayton. Both of the latter are professional photographers, and they're generous with advice as well as free film. Their mission, of course, is to lure the Fuji heathens among us back into the Kodak fold.

Among the 23 participants is a colossal variety of skill and experience quotients. A couple are strictly for-the-fun-of-it hobbyists carrying simple point-and-shoot cameras. At the opposite extreme are a few bearing several thousand dollars' worth of mediumor large-format camera gear and business cards that say "Photographer" even if they earn livings doing something else, like Houston airline pilot Archie Howell. There's a talented high school student from Phoenix, Hugh Winkle, whose tuition for this tour was awarded as a travel grant by the Friends. The rest of us are motley enthusiasts or semiprofessionals. I'm typical: had at least a hundred photos published in newspapers and magazines, but I'm 90 percent writer and barely 10 percent photographer. Unusual lighting situations, which abound in Monument Valley, scare me; and, even under routine conditions, I make stupid mistakes. Our group gathers in Flagstaff on a chilled October morning for the 170-mile bus ride across the Navajo Indian Reservation to Monument Valley. The instructing begins on board. Hoffman lectures on Arizona light, which is not the same as the light where some of us have come from. "We're dealing with a very bright sky here," says Hoffman. "Your camera will read that, not realizing it's supposed to be bright, and will use a smaller aperture or higher shutter speed than it should. Then the rest of the picture will be a little underexposed." The solution, he continues, is to point the camera down a bit for the light metering, trying to find an average level of brightness for the entire frame. Ladd, meanwhile, worries about that sky. "The weather's on the verge of either cooperating very nicely or not cooperating at all," he says. As we pass through the arid, wind-sculpted badlands of the Moenkopi Plateau, the weather seems about to let loose everything at once. Photogenic cumulus clouds cruise over our heads; a gunmetal-gray sheet of rain lashes the horizon to the south, and, ahead, a ruddy dust storm scuttles across the land. It could be a trying afternoon. For a photographer, however, the worst weather is what would strike a tourist or golfer as best: dry, cloudless, nonthreatening. On such days, little worth photographing occurs at sunrise and sunset, and all the daylight in between is what photographers call "flat." It reveals little depth or nuance in landscapes and washes out colors. A serious photographer would rather work in a hurricane. Ladd realizes, however, that for most of us on this tour something in between will offer us the best chance of success; we couldn't handle Monument Valley in a torrential downpour. We arrive in late afternoon, squander an hour of interesting storm fussing around in our motelthis is the difference between amateurs and pros and head out to Keyhole Arch for our first shoot just before sunset. Conditions are tough: nearly complete overcast with just an occasional break, 25-mile-per-hour wind, and intermittent rain. It's a situation that demands both endurance it's frigid and wet and fast-thinking creativity. When the auburn sunlight struggles through the

By the Dawn's Early Light

clouds to paint one distant butte into a giant dying ember, the opportunity lasts just seconds. In the morning, the rain is history, the ubiquitous red dust has been washed from the air, and we're all dreading flat light. Still, well before sunrise, we're shivering out on a ridge overlooking two buttes called The Mittens. Ladd primes us with advice. "One of the hazards of situations like this is that you'll come out here with a good idea of what you want to do, and stick with it." As the eastern sky behind the buttes begins to glow in laminations of orange, peach, and violet, he shares the "180-degree rule": turn 180 degrees and see what's happening behind you. He's right; there's at least one offbeat shot at our backs: the ghostly image of a score of photographers hunched over tripods, reflected in the gold-glazed windows of our bus. Several camera problems arise, all courtesy of the latest technology. The one participant shooting video finds that his nickel-cadmium batteries go on strike when it's this cold; the point-and-shoot couple learn that their camera refuses to operate in the low predawn light. The camera insists it's smarter than humans. Someone carrying an even more brilliant camera has forgotten to haul along its encyclopedic manual and can't figure out how to interface with

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Both beginning and advanced stargazers will be delighted by this new full-color guidebook to Arizona's sparkling night sky. Useful throughout the United States, it includes a dozen astronomical maps to use with the unaided eye or nothing more complicated than a pair of binoculars all accompanied by 50 full-color photographs by night-sky photographer Frank Zullo. The 56-page, softcover edition of Discover Arizona's Night Sky is $7.95, plus shipping and handling. Order through the attached order card, or write or visit Arizona Highways, 2039 W. Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009. You can place telephone orders by calling toll-free nationwide 1 (800) 543-5432. In Phoenix, call 258-1000.

the infernal equipment. I observe with satisfaction that I enjoy the most primitive 35mm cameras of the group, a battered pair of Canon AE-1s, and vow to keep them forever.

Sunrise and sunset usually are the best times to shoot the long views of a place such as Monument Valley. But the rest of the day, even in less-than-enchanting light, can be put to good use. Ladd begins conditioning us to think about foregrounds boulders, dunes, wildflowers, hoary junipers that can become the primary subjects of our pictures, while the buttes and spires loiter in the background.

Flat light or not, there are nice scenes for the taking. A stump of long-dead juniper, gnarled and weathered like desert driftwood, slowly decays in the lee of a thousand-foot-high sandstone butte, and the desiccated starkness of the two objects together forms a coherent statement about this land. John Drew, one of the more serious shooters among us, frames a shot of a butte through the windows of a Navajo family's truck left to corrode on the valley floor. "It's not an Arizona Highways image," he says, "but it's a useful one." Sure is: it provokes an intense discussion between us about Native American attitudes toward the land. We're learning more than photography.

Another of the day's adventures is a photo opportunity with 71-year-old Suzie Yazzie, Navajo weaver and shepherd. She's wonderfully photogenic and totally unruffled posing for more than 20 photographers at once, all firing strobes and scrambling for position. There's more anxiety for us: Yazzie is a one-woman photographic institution in Monument Valley. She's been the subject of postcards, magazine articles, and several million tourist snapshots. Is a fresh image possible? Some of our group think so when her lead sheepdog trots around in front of the flock and fetchingly crosses its front paws. I say this is one well-trained canine coquette, and I'm not biting. Or snapping.

We arrive at a location, just as Ladd planned, at sunset's tawniest light. The boulders glow orange at our feet, while the backlit spires to the west are turning an ever-deepening purple. Ladd says the light is great, and we hastily jockey for position, trying to keep all the other shooters out of our frames. There's maybe five minutes before the light dies. It's not enough time for great photography, not enough time to sift carefully all the options and pitfalls. I want to shoot straight into the sun as it slides behind a spire, and I have no idea how to choose my exposure. Dimly I remember a college photojournalism profs advice: "Film is the cheapest resource you have." So I burn up a roll using two-stop bracketingmeaning that if the meter reads f/8, I also shoot exposures at f/4, f/5.6, f/11, and f/16.

Among the wasted film, I capture some decent pictures and learn a little more about landscape photography. I begin to see that Monument Valley itself is a good teacher. It's so demanding that when you fail, you fail miserably. When you succeed, it's spectacular. Both are useful.

Sunday morning the light is indolently flat and most of our pictures if mine are representative are dull. The tour, though, hasn't been.

First lesson: landscape photography is tough work. It demands 12-hour days, before sunup to evening's last light, frequently in lousy weather. But the good photographer is energized by all this.

Second: the more serious and accomplished you become as a photographer, the more intently you see and appreciate the landscape. Even without camera in hand, you instinctively notice light, textures, visual poetry. With a camera, you concentrate on details you would have ignored before: the texture of a Navajo woman's hair, for example, or the implications of a junked truck in a timeless landscape.

And last: photography is a great shared interest, a catalyst to friendship. Sometimes photo buffs prattle tediously about film types and darkroom arcana, but, more often, they talk about their ways of seeing, which can be profound. And we share more than we compete. On this tour, a newfound friend leads me to a wonderful tree he's discovered that frames a distant butte. I pay back the favor by explaining my theory of photographing people (stolen from Richard Avedon): use a tripod and cable release so you can move out from behind the camera and relate to your subject as one human to another, placing no machine in between.

I had been in Monument Valley as a tourist a few months back; then, a couple of hours of sight-seeing seemed adequate. Now, as a photographer, two days is too little. Too many clichéd compositions, too many stupid mistakes. Back home in Tucson, the developer hands me boxes of slides containing nothing that is brilliantly original, but a few frames are better than any landscape photos I've shot before.

My other time there, I had taken no pic tures; I was frightened of committing Monument Valley to film rather than only to memory which is private, and there fore not subject to evaluation. At this writ ing, I still feel no exhilarating sense of accomplishment. But determination, yes. I know more now. I'll be back.

Travel Guide: For detailed information about Arizona's many travel locations, we recommend the guidebook Travel Arizona and Arizona: Land of Contrasts, a videotape by Bill Leverton. Both will direct you to exciting destinations and outof-the-way attractions in the state. Our Arizona Road Atlas, featuring maps of 27 cities, mileage charts, and points of inter est, also is very useful for travelers. To inquire about these products and addition al travel publications, or to place an order, telephone 1 (800) 543-5432. In the Phoenix area, call 258-1000.

Lawrence W. Cheek, a frequent contributor of articles to this and other national publications, says he has noticed that taking pictures in all kinds of weather may be uncomfortable at times, but it pays better than writing.

TRAVEL WITH THE FRIENDS OF ARIZONA HIGHWAYS

Here is a partial schedule of the Friends of Arizona Highways tours:

Photo Tours

August 22-25: Join Edward McCain in the cool pine country of northeastern Arizona on a trek to discover the beauty of the wildflowers that carpet Hannagan Meadow.

August 29-September 2: Theresa and Gordon Whelpley explore Canyon de Chelly's prehistoric ruins in the mornings, and focus their cameras on Native American powwow festivities at Chinle in the afternoons and evenings.

October 1-3: Tom Till leads a trip to Monument Valley, a wonderland where light and shadow add drama to the fantastically sculpted sandstone formations.

October 24-27: P. K. Weis and Peter Kresan focus on the myriad wonders in the Chiricahua Mountains, a land of curious geology and unusual flora and fauna.

Scenic Tours

Twoand three-day tours, held in association with the Arizona Automobile Association, are scheduled regularly to the Grand Canyon and Lake Powell.

For information on Photo Tours (limited to 20 persons), telephone the Friends of Arizona Highways Travel Desk (602) 2715904. For details and to make reservations for the AAA Scenic Tours, telephone (602) 274-5805 in Phoenix or 1 (800) 352-5382 statewide.