This is Horseshoe Bend, a famous 360-degree turn in the Colorado River near Page, Arizona. It costs ten dollars to get in, and I spent $30 so that I could see it three times: in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening. In the morning and the afternoon the shadows are pretty heavy this time of year, but in the evening you can get a good shot as long as you use a tripod and set a fairly long shutter speed.

This picture is a 4-segment panorama taken a few minutes after sundown. It took a fair amount of effort to get Photoshop to stitch this into a single image properly, but eventually everything came together. At the bottom center you can see a group of rafters who had stopped for the evening to camp at the base of the rock.

I’ve been playing around with converting some of my Arizona pictures to black and white. I’ve never been especially good at this, but Arizona provides a pretty good backdrop for practice. The black-and-white version of Horseshoe Bend is at the bottom.

January 26, 2020 — Page, Arizona

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate