The Grand Canyon - South Ridge
Have you ever had a place or a movie, a book or a TV show hyped up so much that by the time you finally get a chance to experience this thing, it just doesn’t live up to the hype? This feeling most certainly did not happen at the Grand Canyon. It was quite the opposite. No amount of hype, no amount of footage, photographs or other art could possibly prepare me for the majesty of this “hole in the ground.”
As expected, the park itself was quite packed full of people to the point where there was a very long line of cars waiting to get through the main gates into Grand Canyon National Park. A line so long that my dad and I almost decided to skip the Grand Canyon. Glad to say we didn’t, but after driving from Albuquerque, NM to Monument Valley, AZ (an almost six hour drive) and then another five hour drive to the Grand Canyon to catch the sunset, with an additional three hour drive to get to our next hotel in Las Vegas.
Anyways, I would have been absolutely crazy to pass up the opportunity to see this masterpiece of nature.
Something I learned from this trip, as a photographer and as I rediscover my style after years of not shooting, is that I used to spend so much time trying to get beautiful photographs of places with no people in them. When you think of some of the greatest landscape or architectural photographs, there are rarely people in them.
One of the things that I think aided in my underestimating the Grand Canyon is how few great shots of it I have seen with people to provide some scale. So I definitely went out of my way to make sure I got a person in almost all of my photographs.
You know. Except for the first one where I was just so thrilled with the moon.
