Photo: Panorama Antelope Canyon Arizona Fine Art In Stone Nature Creation

The slot canyon, Antelope Canyon, is Fine Art captured in stone, one of the most photogenic nature creation I was lucky enough to photograph, with my panorama camera, long before tourist buses discovered it.

Antelope Canyon and me is like hate and love, all at the same time. I was lucky enough to visit this amazing place for the first time in April 1993 with a friend of mine from Freising, Germany. This was also the time I captured this wide panorama photo, which is included in my nature fine art collection.

This fine art panorama photograph was taken long before slot canyon was really discovered by travel guides and tourist companies. A colleague was telling those days about this amazing unique nature creation (I called it later "Fine Art in Stone") near Page in Arizona. At this time the Lower Antelope Canyon, which you see in this picture, was nothing but a crack in the sandstone in the middle of the desert.

I remember that a local guy told us (that was before we ran around with a GPS unit) where to lock for it. We had a pretty good idea on the map but when we arrived we couldn't find it. ... continue below the picture...

This picture is part of the photo album "Panorama Pictures" - there are more beautiful images waiting for you.

... Don't laugh, I know today this is simply impossible but this is almost 20 years ago, and in those days we were shooting film, using a compass and a map to find locations by looking at the topographic structure on a map guessing if anything interesting could be there. of course we also used books and ideas from other photographers but you always really had to do your homework to find such beautiful places which weren't popular at that time.

Today, you are restricted to a maximum of 2 hours inside the canyon and you only can go in with a guide. Puhhh, that sure takes the magic out of such a sacred place. But I don't want to blame anyone here, today there is no other choice but restrictions as simply too many people want to check this slot canyon out.

Well, when we finally found the canyon we needed some light climbing gear to get into Lower Antelope Canyon in the first place. It was scary too, we were all by ourselves, big pools of water in the canyon and yes, we also heard about flash floods but what we didn't get was a good weather forecast. We didn't have the internet, GPS or an IPad with us, so it was all a little bit iffy plus we were fairly young, coming from another country, speaking another languages. It was a challenge, believe me.

Anyway, to make the story short, we spent hours inside the canyon and one of the photos I took is this panorama pictures of the Lower Antelope Canyon - I still call it "Fine Art in Stone" although today a photograph like this one would not be as special anymore, simply because it is one of the most photographed canyons today, "everybody" seen it and photographed it on a "Point and Shot" or "DSLR-Camera.

To me this photo means the world in nature, it reminds me at times when it was still difficult to create a photograph, it was still something special using film, keeping the dust out, keep it cold, make sure no dust gets into the camera when changing film (hahaha, after climbing into a sandstone canyon!!) and we were still using a light-meter, a 2 degree spot meter.

So here we go, thats a bit of the story behind this fine art panorama photo I photographed almost 20 years ago. I had it published a couple time in the very early years, it was too exotic to show it in a travel guide or magazine but I published it myself on one of my panorama large format calendars, gosh, they were so beautiful, thick paper, amazing offset print quality, great scans, they were simply beautiful. I selected this photo for the cover one year and my slide show visitors and customers absolutely loved this photograph. Reason enough for me to put it into my fine art collection.

Photographed with a Fuji 617, Format 6x17cm, Fuji Velvia, 90mm lens, scanned on a Hasselblad X5 high end scanner. I hope you enjoy the picture as much as I do.

Panorama photo of Lower Antelope Canyon (slot canyon) near Page, Arizona, USA. (#TravelPanoWednesday)