It has been years in wait for an opportunity to visit this location. Meanwhile, information about this location has grown in popularity. In fact, what I found was that during most daylight hours, there is a constant procession of individuals making the short hike to get their Instagram and TikTok shot. Along with another group of droners wanting to record them walking to the pinnacle or fly around it to document their visit. This makes it challenging to find an uninterrupted moment to take your photo. My suggestion is that any attempt to visit this place on a weekend will be a crowded situation and not recommended. What I did realize after my three visits was that any before sunrise shot would have a lower probability of the tourists, who most likely are still sleeping in at some lodge. As it turned out, I had the area to myself till around 9:00 AM MST, when I started walking out to see a group of seven heading in. But that was on a Monday morning and there was a storm front heading towards Hanksville. That night it would snow and I had to drive through it on my return to home. I would wake the next morning in Dillon, Colorado to a foot of snow on my car.
The synopsis of the shot entailed visiting this location three times: once to recon, a second time for a sunset shot that was the suggestion shot in the ever informative Photographers Trail Notes. The third visit was the morning of my last day there. That was because after taking my Angel of Death spire photo and noticing how interesting the sky and clouds were, I felt that it should take the time to try capturing a photo or two at Long Dong Silver. So I when I finished up at Angel of Death spire, I walked the half mile over to Long Dong Sliver (Lone Spire), as shown on the below hiking track.
The Photographers Trail Notes website suggested shooting from the side of the slope of the hillside that connects the butte to the spire. This is what I was concentrating on during my recon and sunset visit. But it was during the second visit that I became aware that there was a composition that would place the Angel of Death spire in between the two pinnacles that make up the Long Dong Sliver. It also would allow the crest of the soil mound to be a leading line from the bottom left corner.
For those that like gear, this image was shot using my new Peak Design Carbon Fiber Travel Tripod. This tripod is light and packs down to a small footprint making it very easy to carry. However, the one downside is that like all travel tripods, its max deployment height is 60″ with the center column fully extended or 51″ using the tripod base only. For the majority of our shooting situations this works just fine. So I would suggest that you should check it out to determine if it meets your price performance determination.
Now let me share with you how I shot this image and some of the post-processing actions. These shots were taken in Average Metering Mode using Aperture Priority. This is a composite high dynamic range image built from a three-exposure blends to build the composition image with the expanded histogram shown above. For the first exposure, I was concentrating on getting the tone of the sky and clouds just the way I was seeing them. For Exposures 2 and 3, I was ensuring the left and right boundaries of the histogram weren’t clipped. These photos were then stacked in Photoshop, aligned, and blended to build the composition image on the right. That rendered the Exposure Bia to zero and minimized the Brightness Value to 7.49, which is a 0.05 percent increase above normal. This composite image rendered with complementary colors with tonal focus highlighting the sky and cloud tones. The brightness of course was to slightly brighten the image that was still lit with a soft diffused light by the cloudy sky. Color grading was applied to the masked ground to return the real gray tone that noticeably dominates this valley.
The popularity of this place and the lack of understanding of the delicacy of cyanobacteria soil is evident by all the footprints all over as shown in the before image. As for having to remove all tracks in the cryptobiotic soil this is a little tricker than usual. This is because cryptobiotic soil doesn’t have a pattern nor smoothness to copy. So using the typical spot healing, remove tool, healing brush tool, patch tool, content-aware move tool, or the generative fill failed to replicate. Since I had just had to deal with this situation while editing my Factory Butte image, I turned to use the Clone Stamp Tool with the settings shown below in the screenshot with mode set to Dissolve, Opacity at 52% and Flow at 65% using a 60 brush and Shape Dynamics active. It seemed to work really well and you can see from the featured photo. For those that view this photo, a close look at the primary spire besides seeing the bands of soil sediment will notice that there is a blue climbing rope still suspended from the top of the spire.
