Star Wars Canyon
March 27, 2019
What a day! Day 9 in the Death Valley National Park area I spent 4 hours sitting on top of the hill shooting the fighter jets as they made their pass-through Star Wars Canyon. The actual name of the canyon is Rainbow Canyon. The nickname comes from the Star Wars movie when Luke Skywalker and the others drop into the “canyon” to destroy the Death Star. I don’t know if it was the pilots or the photographers that gave the canyon the nickname.
The military has a contract with the National Park Service allowing them to practice nap-of-the-earth and under radar flying in this canyon. When the pilots are deployed to combat areas, they have experience at flying in this type of terrane.
It’s a challenge to capture jets flying this fast this close. I love to go to air shows and capture the planes as they pass over the audience. Well this is definitely not your run of the mill air show. The pilots have a purpose for flying here and it is not to entertain us like it is at an air show at NAS Jacksonville. I had to change just about all the settings on my camera. I was using my Nikon D4 with my Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary lens. I set my ISO to 320 and set my camera to shutter priority with a shutter speed of 1/1250 sec and let the camera set my f-stop. I did this because as the jets came through the canyon the lighting changes constantly, but I wanted to “stop” the planes as I panned them through the canyon.
On some of the images I cropped in on them to show the plane and the heat exhaust from the engines, while other images I left at full frame to show how close these fighters were to the canyon walls. I hope that you enjoy viewing my images as much as I enjoyed taking them. You can view the entire gallery here.
