Trophy Hunting in Utah - Leica M10

During a recent business trip to Utah I had a free weekend between meetings, so I decided I'd take my camera gear and see what there was to photograph.Never having been outside the environs of Salt Lake City and Park City, I didn't know where to go, so started with Google Maps. Obviously there are lots of mountains and suchlike, but then I saw these things called National Parks. Two of them specifically seemed within reach - Arches and Canyonlands. A bit more googling and...oh...ah...I see. That's where THOSE ICONIC IMAGES are taken.A mission was born - go "Trophy Hunting". I'm referring to what are called "Trophy Shots" - those images that are taken by millions of people and are so overdone that they are simply everywhere. It's not my usual modus operandi as I usually target "the other shot", but why not for a change? No harm in it. And anyway, who doesn't want a shot of Mesa Arch at sunrise, glowing in all its finery? I put together a plan - Mesa Arch, Delicate Arch, Balancing Rock. Plus anything else I could find. That should do it.I had been forewarned that it would be VERY hot down there. I was prepped for hot weather, with wide brimmed hat, suncream, lightweight clothes and boots, and lots of water. Four hours and 230 miles later I found myself doing an evening reconnaissance of Mesa Arch. You know the one - it glows underneath in the morning sunrise. It was cold and very wet as thunderstorms lashed the landscape. I had a down jacket and woolly hat on! And the arch itself was somewhat uninspiring, being smaller than you'd expect. The walk to the arch from the parking spot is easy - 10 minutes or so along a well marked trail.Regarding photographing Mesa Arch - it's a bit of a science. According to the expert trophy hunters, it must be done at dawn, with the sun hitting the rock face below the arch and the reflected light casting a fiery orange/red glow onto the underside of the arch. A small aperture must be used to create a "sun star" which must intersect with the rock to be more obvious. Some cloud cover is useful. Also, it gets VERY BUSY there, so arriving early to set up and "bag" a spot is essential. Plus it was a Saturday. Plus it was a holiday weekend. Thus I set my alarm for 3:30am the following day, and arrived at the arch at 4:15am, the first one there. Hooray! Note that there was nobody at the park entrance that early, so entrance was free. Bonus. Plus the twisty road up there is rather good fun.I bagged my spot by placing my tripod in the location I'd recce'd the previous evening, and after checking the position of sunrise with the excellent Sky Guide app. This would ensure I got the "correct" window into the view beyond, and the sun star, and the arch. It was a bit like bagging a spot at a football match actually.10 minutes later another photographer arrived. Then another, then another. Then 10 more, and a family with kids, and some more photographers etc. With an hour to go there was a perfect arch of photographers around the arch of rock, tripods overlapping. Happily, there was good banter and everyone was extremely well behaved. The chap with a big DSLR (Nikon 810 I think) next to me asked what my camera was. I told him. He asked how many pixels it had. I sighed and said 24 million. He was unimpressed. I sighed again, not wanting to indulge him or speak about the beauty of a Summilux lens.While waiting I tried some fairly unsuccessful astrophotography which kept me amused.As the sky lightened and dawn began, anticipation increased. I re-checked everything. M10, 24mm Summilux, ISO 100, f/16, daylight white balance, cable release, shutter speed to be set when it all kicked off.Then a bank of cloud appeared where the sun was meant to come up. No no no no no....! The sun moved above the horizon but was obscured. The rock didn't glow. Shutters clattered anyway. Click click click click. I just stood there and waited. There was a little gap in the cloud. The sun would reach the gap. It would shine through and illuminate the rock face, making the arch glow and giving me a lovely sun star. It would. For sure.It did! For 15 seconds the sun appeared. In the correct place. The arch glowed. The sun star happened. There was a cacophony of shutters going off. I was set up for an initial horizontal shot of the left half the arch, so took that. Then I switched to portrait orientation and pinged off a 6-shot panorama. Then the sun went in. That was it. The sun didn't reappear again until it was much higher and the lovely saturated glow had gone.The pics looked great on the back of the camera. Trophy #1 captured.By about 30 minutes after sunrise, most people had left, so I wandered about trying different compositions and generally having a great time fiddling about. This would come in handy 2 days later.I went back to the hotel to sleep.The sunset plan was to shoot Delicate Arch, in Arches National Park. The arch is meant to glow read as the sun goes down. The "correct" shot has the rock below the arch in shade and the arch itself throbbing with fiery light. Due to a lack of staff, there was nobody at Arches park entrance either, so that was free as well. It was hot. The car said 42C. I had A LOT of water with me. They are doing roadworks in the park so the roads are closed at night except on a Saturday night, so luckily I'd be able to stay late.The walk up to the arch was pretty tough in the heat. It's only about a mile and a half, but the heat reflecting off the rocks was brutal. Still, plenty of people were going up. With sunset at 8pm I set off at 6pm and got up there just under an hour later after a few stops to drink some of the 4 litres of water I had in my bag. When I got there it was mobbed. Probably 200 people up there, waiting for sunset. And a nice line of people waiting to have their picture taken under the arch - very civilised indeed. But not good for photography.The whole area is like a natural amphitheatre, surrounded by higher rock on 3 sides. The rock itself is smooth and slippery sandstone, called "slickrock". It curves downwards into a depression which is deeper and steeper than you think. Actually pretty dangerous - it's easy to find yourself on a steepening bit and losing grip. Not nice - you need to be careful.To try and eliminate the crowds, I went behind the arch where there was absolutely nobody (it's a bit hairy getting around it) and nailed some nice shots from there. Then I found a little hole in the rock on the lead up to the arch and took a more interesting picture through that which I quite like. For sunset I decided to go down into the depression and shoot up at the arch from a distance, using the bands in the sandstone as a lead-in line. There was also a cool looking gnarled dead juniper tree down there, which contrasted nicely with the delicacy of Delicate Arch.And so I waited for sunset. That bank of cloud came back. Sunset was undramatic. No fiery arch. Just relative dullness. Still, I like my shot with the dead tree in it.I was still missing an actual trophy shot of Delicate Arch though, so I decided to hang about. My Sky Guide app predicted the Milky Way would be immediately behind the arch at 11pm. That's surely worth waiting for. I hung around. The crowds gradually petered away, replaced by fluttering bats and weird insects, until there were just idiot photographers left. Their number decreased and by 11pm there were just three of us left, and some stars, with a bit of annoying cloud.Not be an expert astrophotographer, I figured I'd use a shutter speed of about 15 sec, a wide aperture of f/2 and whatever ISO looked about right (1600-3200). Of course, it's pitch black, and any white light head torch close up destroys night vision immediately, so red light was essential for checking camera settings etc. Even the glow of the camera screen is too bright. Plus it was extremely hairy moving about the slickrock slope in darkness. Composing is tricky as you can't see anything, or focus on anything. We ended up with one of us lighting the arch with a torch while the other two composed and focused.And so we played about, lighting the arch in different ways and hoping the cloud would clear (which it mostly did) and I played about with various settings hoping I'd get it about right. I was moderately happy with the results, and came away with some quite cool stuff. The trek back down was quite fast and a lot cooler, which was a huge relief. Trophy #2 done.My drive back took me past Balanced Rock, an intriguing tower of sandstone with a massive boulder on top of it. Seeing as I was getting into this astrophotography thing, I thought I might as well stop and take its picture with the Milky Way still being out & about, and it would give me Trophy #3. Again, there were three of us there, one who had come down from Delicate Arch. It was 1am by this time.Happily, one of the photographers had a ridiculously powerful searchlight of a torch, so we took it in turns to light the rock and tower from a slightly oblique angle (better to show the form & texture) and snap away with the Milky Way putting on a good show. To light paint a massive thing like this, or Delicate Arch, you need just a few seconds of light - we used 5 secs for Balanced Rock, and it was important to try and light it evenly.Camera settings were the same as for Delicate Arch - about 15 secs, f/2, ISO 1600-3200. The M10 is annoying that it is not possible to turn off the long exposure noise reduction facility, which means you wait for another 15 secs after every shot to let it do it's thing (without seemingly much effect to the end image it has to be said). I'd really like Leica to enable this function to be turned off.After getting a good number of shots, I was wandering back to the car when I saw a rather cool looking dead tree. Setting up quickly (and blinding myself with my head torch in the process) I ended up with a decent composition of tree, Milky Way and Balanced Rock which worked nicely, and was far more interesting than a simple shot of Balanced Rock on its own. Trophy Shot #3 done.The following day I had a lie in, then went out in the ridiculous heat to walk a few canyons to get a few non-trophy shots. Three trophy shots is sufficient for one weekend in my book. I didn't do very well to be honest and wasted the morning getting baked and bitten and stung, before retiring to the coolness of McDonalds in Moab.For the afternoon, what better than to head back into the roasting desert sun? I had spotted some weird bright blue lake-like things near Moab on Google Earth so decided to go for a look-see. Further investigation revealed that these things are evaporation ponds for a large potash mine nearby. They pump Colorado river water into the mine which absorbs the potash, which they then pump into these ponds where the water evaporates leaving the potash behind. Smart stuff in an area of much solar energy.To get there, I had to leave my rental car as the road turned into a steep, rock strewn hillclimb which would have ripped the guts out of the car, and walk a mile uphill to get to it. Turns out that the pools are every bit as blue as they appear on the satellite imagery - very startling in the otherwise drab red landscape, especially with the rim of evaporated salts around the edge. Very cool and really quite strange. I used a Lee Seven5 polariser and 0.6ND on these shots, which still annoys me due to the reflections that wreck the image if you aren't careful to wrap it all in a cloth.And that was it for day 2. I had some ridiculously good burnt ends at Blu Pig in Moab which I highly recommend.On the way back to Salt Lake City I stopped off again for dawn in Canyonlands to shoot Shafer Canyon at dawn, which was really rather beautiful.As it was just up the road, I popped up to Mesa Arch again. it was only an hour after sunset, and it was completely empty - not a soul there. I spend some lovely time taking some more abstract images, and the arch itself was glowing rather nicely in the low sun. While it was difficult to get the trophy sun star, it was still rather exceptional. I did a panorama with my iPhone which turned out to actually be very good indeed especially as I could be rather further back and get a better view of it all.In summary, it was excellent fun trophy hunting for a couple of days. Moab is a very target-rich environment and I was actually very pleased to nail the Mesa Arch shot. I know thousands of people have it, but I don't care. I have it now as well and I really enjoyed getting it. That being said, the number of people around at the trophy sites (during the golden hours) was fairly annoying, but then they aren't "my" trophy sites, they are for everyone so it's important to share. What was great was the cooperation between everyone, the good humour, and general politeness. I also hugely enjoyed the astrophotography, more because of the emptiness and uniqueness of being out in the deep night in the "wilderness" (never far from the car in reality) than the photography itself.The Leica performed very nicely indeed, and was enjoyable as usual. No problems at all with the new firmware (1.9.4). I just wish you could turn off the long exposure noise reduction.For all those (like me) who are usually somewhat cynical about getting trophy shots, I recommend you try it. Great fun, and they are trophy shots for a reason.Here is a larger selection of images from the weekend.