thomasholmphoto

Roarie in Peek-a-boo

Added 2025-03-14 15:00:04 +0000 UTC

Yes, the name of this particular slot canyon near Escalante is indeed Peek-A-Boo.
If you’re there in the morning or early afternoon, you get these amazing colors:

Sunlight hits the red rock, bouncing onto other red rock, creating these intense orange-red hues. At the same time, the shaded, slightly shiny rock reflects the deep blue sky (the elevation is quite high there), giving you those indigo-blue tones.

This scene brings up an important question for photographers:

What exactly is the “right color”?

Our eyes naturally adapt and neutralize white based on the available light. But when there’s no white in the scene, our eyes neutralize to skin tones that are actually very red, making the model look colorless. The deep blue tones then become invisible.

So as a photographer, do you adjust the image to look great visually, try to match your memory of the place, or do you aim for something “objectively correct” - like making the skin tones appear more or less normal, even though they’re actually lit by orange light?

On a previous image from the same series I edited it so red/orange that most of the blues were gone. I think I was overcome by visual adaption back then (the eyes compensate for colorcast by increasing sensitivity for the complementary color).