Canyoneering Photography

June 12, 2016 ·

Bill Sharpsteen

Deimos Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 1Dx, 16-35mm f/2.8 @35mm ISO 6400, f/4.5, 1/500

Photographing the relatively obscure sport of canyoneering takes me to some of the most remote, amazing locations in the U.S. But coming back with good images took years of developing an eye for how to overcome the unique challenges canyoneering presents.

Pine Creek Canyon, Zion N.P. Canon 5DIII, 16-35mm f/2.8 @35mm ISO 25600, f/6.7, 1/60

Deimos Canyon in Death Valley National Park is so hidden, it takes a 3,000′ climb up steep, loose rock in the Amargosa Mountains to get there. As you approach it, the canyon looks like a jagged knife had carved through the rough, volcanic rock and left a wrinkled gash so stark, it’s nearly invisible from a distance. One of many canyons penetrating Death Valley’s arid mountains, Deimos evolved out of rare flash floods that gradually whittled a groove through the rock, making it so deep shade is the dominant light source.

To travel through Deimos requires ropes and other gear for rappelling down its sheer rock walls and other obstacles. There’s a name for this: canyoneering, a somewhat dangerous sport that’s been growing in popularity, especially in the Southwest U.S. where there are hundreds of canyons to explore.

And if canyoneering sounds difficult to do, try photographing it.

In places, the light is so dim, I have to crank up to five-digit ISOs for decent shutter speeds. Elsewhere, the rocks along the canyon rim are harshly lit with slashes of sunlight making for some of the ugliest photons ever to hit a sensor. The spaces are often confined with little wiggle room for finding good angles. If I want to capture my friends rappelling, I’m usually restricted to shooting down at them, getting great shots of their helmets, or pointing up at them—butts on rock, I call it.

Spry Canyon, Zion N.P. Canon Rebel (borrowed from my wife after I drowned my 5DII the day before) 15 mm f/2.8, ISO 400, f/6.3, 1/100

Cerberus Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 1Dx, 24-70mm f/2.8 @24mm ISO 3200, f/8, 1/250

Conversely, there’s so much to photograph. The stunning canyon landscapes are otherworldly in the extreme. Nearly impenetrable, high walls tower above. Colorful, geologic layers of time surround you. And always, there’s the almost improbable element of people traveling through all of this. (At the risk of burying the lead, my friends are mostly 60 year-olds, so in a way, we’re even more unlikely on that score.)

Trouble is, unlike other photography genres, there’s not a lot out there from which to learn how other people have overcome the challenges. When I began canyoneering about five years ago, most examples were from amateurs who uploaded their unedited jpgs directly to a website, the aforementioned flaws abundantly displayed.

Yes, there is excellent photography of rock climbing, which is sort of canyoneering in reverse, but I discovered there wasn’t a lot for me to learn from it. Climbing photographers often rappel down to their subjects enabling them to get shots from above and to the side for those dramatic, that-looks-really-scary pictures. Generally speaking, there just isn’t enough space in a canyon on a rappel for me to do that.

Pine Creek Canyon, Zion N.P. Canon 5DIII, 16-35mm f/2.8 @35mm ISO 1600, f/11, 1/90

Eaton Canyon, San Gabriel Mtns, California Canon 1Dx, 16-35mm f/2.8 @35mm ISO 6400, f/8, 1/250

And so I realized I would have to develop my own criteria, my own aesthetic, if you will. In a sense, I was inventing the genre from scratch, making plenty of mistakes while gradually figuring out what comprised—to my mind—a great canyoneering picture. And while I don’t expect to inspire many people to take up canyoneering for themselves, I think the learning process I went through can be applied to other kinds of image making.

Lesson One: Sense of Place

The best adventure photographs not only show an activity in an amazing location, but transport the viewer into that world through a sense of place. Maybe you get a whiff of the heat or the cold. Maybe you can feel for a moment how vast the landscape was, or how confined a space it was to travel through. Perhaps it’s trying to convey how precipitous—or scary—a rappel was. Getting any of that in one canyoneering shot is often a hard rock to crack.

Bad Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 5DII, 28-70mm f/2.8 @28mm ISO 100, f/8, 1/200

Telephone Canyon, Zion N.P. Canon 5DIII, 16-35mm f/2.8 @35mm ISO 400, f/9.5, 1/180

My first canyon shots went mainly for bodies clinging to ropes. After all, that’s what we were doing as we worked our way over the natural obstacles—we were rappelling and that in itself seemed pretty interesting for, oh, maybe five pictures. After several trips and studying hundreds of my drab pictures, I realized they all felt superficial because one couldn’t tell what it was like to be in a canyon.

I reworked my compositions and first went for the obvious solution: show some pipsqueak of a person in an overwhelming landscape. While this has become something of an adventure photography cliché, it did provide a feeling of scale echoing the sense of awe I always feel traveling through the canyons. I accomplished this by slapping on my 16-35mm zoom usually cranked pretty wide. The canyoneer occupied an appropriately tiny spot in the lower third corner or upper third corner of the composition with the canyon itself nearly swallowing her whole. It may have been a little trite, but, hey, it was still pretty dramatic and provided a sense of place.

But then I started to notice how the wide angle perspective sometimes pushed the background too far back and diluted the utter magnificence of the scene. The true epiphany came when we were in Death Valley’s Helios Canyon at the first rappel, a near vertical 65′ wall with a wide throat of deep canyon behind the person on the rope. I was able to scramble up above and to the side of the rappel where I used the super wide angle lens to get in the whole scene. Unfortunately, the resulting pictures didn’t feel like they were even taken in a canyon. The steep slopes in the background appeared off in the distance and looked like a scruffy, dry hillside. There was no sense of place.

Helios Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 1Dx, 24-70mm f/2.8 @24mm ISO 800, f/11, 1/1000 four exposures stitched together

We returned to Helios a couple of years later and I figured out my revenge on the gods of blah pictures. I perched in the same position, but this time used a 24-70mm set at 24mm. True, that’s still pretty wide, but not anything close to 16mm. Following standard panoramic protocol, I framed vertically and took a series of shots from left to right, overlapping each by a third. When I got to the rappel on the right side of the composition, I held the camera still and took several shots of each canyoneer as he or she stepped over the edge and started down so that I would have a choice of action for the right side of the frame. I then stitched the pictures together in Photoshop. The slightly longer focal length compressed the scene just enough while the pano format showed the canyon’s vastness.

Lesson Two: Post-Production

Like most subjects, there’s no such thing as getting a good canyoneering picture straight out of the camera. To properly convey the feel of a place takes some computer time. But first I had to understand what it was like for me to be there, to strip away the usual memories of physical effort and periodic thrills, and get to my core impressions.

Vinegaroon Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 1Dx, 16-35mm f/2.8 @35mm ISO 1600, f/8, 1/350

Coffin Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 1Dx, 16-35mm f/2.8 @16mm ISO 800, f/8, 1/350

And then I entered Deimos Canyon. There it was: the weird sensation I often get—but hadn’t yet articulated—of dropping deep into the earth’s subconscious. Of course! It felt like we were descending into the terrestrial id.

So my next challenge was how to show that without getting Photoshop’s fingerprints all over my pictures.

After more noodling, the partial solution came with Lightroom’s radial filter. With any picture of someone rappelling, after the usual fiddling with highlight and shadow recovery to overcome the extremes in light along with a gob of noise reduction (hey, those four- and five-digit ISOs don’t come cheap), I pop in the radial filter with the outside exposure set to around minus .70. I stretch and rotate the filter to isolate the canyoneer by making the scene around him darker. At the same time, I’m able to accentuate the feel of descent into something subterranean.

Lastly, it’s on to Photoshop where I’ll use a curves adjustment to darken the entire picture, then invert the mask to black and finally paint in with white the effect at the sides of the rappel itself. I usually feather the hell out of this, going all the way to 200 pixels so, again, it’s not noticeable. On top of this, I’ll add a smidge of lightening directly above the canyoneer with another curves adjustment, painting in just enough brightness to suggest sunlight coming in from above.

Granted, this isn’t always exactly what the scene itself looked like, but that’s not the point. It’s how the scene felt to me that matters.

Bonita Canyon, San Bernardino Mtns., California Canon 1Dx, 70-200mm f/2.8 @200mm ISO 3200, f/8, 1/250

Bailey Canyon, San Gabriel Mtns., California Canon 1Dx, 24-70mm f/2.8 @24mm ISO 1250, f/5.6, 1/350

Lesson Three: Gesture

One of the strange things about photographing someone rappelling is how many of the shots make them look like they’re standing still. Most canyoneers don’t launch off the rock in big looping leaps as you might have seen in the movies. Try that while going down a waterfall and you’ll probably break both ankles. Instead, they walk backwards, pausing for various obstacles or to check what’s coming up (or down?). As a result, I was coming away with a lot of boring shots.

So I had to develop an eye for gesture, that subtle pivot point in a series of pictures where the person’s body language says, “I’m sliding down this gossamer thread and managing to make it look graceful.” It’s always a bonus to also get their facial expression. Those make for the best shots and go a long way to telling a story (see below).

I look for gesture when I’m shooting, of course, but also when I’m editing. A simple example is taking several frames of the group descending through a tight canyon corridor. It’s not enough to just have gear-laden bodies in this amazing scene for human interest or action, it’s selecting the one shot that has gesture: their feet are cocked upward in the middle of a step instead of being flat against the ground. Their arms are moving forward. Their eyes concentrate on the route.

Getting the right gesture is one my excuses for carrying my Canon 1Dx. Yeah, it’s a brick of a camera, but it shoots 12 frames a second. Lots of potential gestures there.

Approach to Hades Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 5DIII, 24-70mm f/2.8 @24mm ISO 12800, f/2.8, 1/15

Lesson Four: Telling a Story

As I said, my first few thousand photographs were almost still lifes. People hanging on a rope. But after seeing so much of that on the Lightroom grid view my eyes bled, I started to look for moments taking place off-stage where my friends were doing things that told a story. Or, at least, the viewer could surmise a narrative from the picture, forcing her to slow down for a moment and think about it—“What’s going on here?” she might ask.

Eaton Canyon, San Gabriel Mtns., California Canon 5DII, 16-35mm f/2.8 @16mm ISO 1600, f/8, 1/80

Telling a story is a photojournalist’s skill I picked up years ago while in a different career (television news video photographer) and after exercising the muscle a bit, I started noticing the quiet moments: the subtle, maybe even routine actions canyoneers perform dozens of times during a trip. These are photographs you almost never see among canyoneering portfolios. One of my favorites is someone pausing at the top of a rappel to scope out the route. Their body language and occasionally dubious facial expressions tell a little story of what it’s like to go backwards down a rope (notice the connection to gesture?). With any luck, the viewer is sucked into the scene because the action humanizes the shot more than most—this isn’t some adventure superhero springing over the rock with incautious ease, but someone considering their limits.

Cerberus Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 1Dx, 24-70mm f/2.8 @24mm ISO 1600, f/22, 1/750

Hades Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 5DIII, 24-70mm f/2.8 @30mm ISO 6400, f/5.6, 1/15

Pasadena Glen Canyon, San Gabriel Mtns. Canon 5DIII, 24-70mm f/2.8 @24mm ISO 1600, f/11, 1/180

I also look for transitional moments that don’t necessarily involve peak action on a rappel so much as a suggestion of what it takes to run a canyon. I get plenty of these storytelling moments during the approach—that hike or climb to a canyon’s entry point—or during body twisting down-climbs—spots where a rope isn’t necessary but the descent still requires finding handholds and footholds to safely get past the obstacle (not so easy when going down). Or, it may be something as simple as a canyoneer coiling a rope surrounded by an utterly unique landscape.

Inconceivable Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 1Dx, 16-35mm f/2.8 @35mm ISO 800, f/8, 1/180 11 exposures blended together in Photoshop

These photographs, more than any other, speak to the reason I go canyoneering. Descending into these otherworldly, hidden places unknown to all but a whittled-down bunch of canyoneers has enriched my life with amazing adventures, and my photography with satisfying images.

Hades Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 5DIII, 24-70mm f/2.8 @65mm ISO 6400, f/9.5, 1/45, Canon 580EXII flash Photography by Gloria Sharpsteen — Hades Canyon, Death Valley N.P. Canon 5DIII, 24-70mm f/2.8 @65mm ISO 6400, f/9.5, 1/45, Canon 580EXII flash

Bill Sharpsteen
June 2016

Luminous-Landscape is a membership site. Our website contains over 5300 articles on almost every topic, camera, lens and printer you can imagine. Our membership model is simple, a Dollar-a-Month ($12.00 USD a year). This $12 gains you access to a wealth of information including all our past and future video tutorials on such topics as Lightroom, Capture One, Printing, file management and dozens of interviews and travel videos.

To continue reading with unlimited access join today for $12 a year

New Articles every few days
All original content found nowhere else on the web
No Pop Up Google Sense ads - Our advertisers are photo related
Download/stream video to any device
NEW videos monthly
Top well-known photographer contributors
Posts from industry leaders
Speciality Photography Workshops
Mobile device scalable
Exclusive video interviews
Special vendor offers for members
Hands On Product reviews
FREE - User Forum. One of the most read user forums on the internet
Access to our community Buy and Sell pages; for members only.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Bill Sharpsteen

See all articles by Bill Sharpsteen

Bill Sharpsteen is a writer/photographer living in the Los Angeles area. His latest book, Canyon Deep, covers the joys of canyoneering through text and photographs. It’s available as an e-book through Amazon e-books, or as a hard cover, available through the author. His journalist ventures have resulted in two books, The Docks, about the Port of Los Angeles, and Dirty Water: One Man’s Fight to Clean Up One of the World’s Most Polluted Bays. He’s also written dozens of articles for such publications as Los Angeles Times Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and Washington Post. His website is www.billsharpsteen.com with links to his blog and Instagram portfolio