(If you want to watch the video go to The Slanted Lens on YouTube)
Hi, this is Jay P. We’re in Bryce Canyon today. We’re going to show you the two best places to photograph in Bryce Canyon, especially if you only have 30 minutes to an hour. 
You can go to exactly these spots, get an excellent image. We’ll show you the camera settings. We’ll show you the locations. We’ll show you where to stay and how to get there. Everything you need to know to be able to shoot in Bryce Canyon if you don’t have a lot of time. So, let’s get into Bryce Canyon and see what we got.
All right. So, we’re driving into Bryce National Park. Now, Bryce is interesting because it’s a single road that goes in and dead ends. But just almost within a mile after you get in the gate is a start of a bowl that has all the hoodoos in it. All the really interesting images you’ve ever seen of Bryce Canyon are shot in that bowl. I shouldn’t say all of them, but most of them are shot in that bowl. 
That bowl starts with Sunrise Point, around to Sunset Point, around to Inspiration Point and then up to the top with Bryce Point. Because that bowl faces east, basically it is much easier to shoot here in the morning than it is in the evening. In the evening the sun drops and you do get kind of a glow on the hoodoos. They can really be some nice beautiful warm hoodoos, but it’s just a matter of it’s not as spectacular as morning. But it is pretty. 
Just about any of these points you can shoot one way or the other and you get a good sunrise or sunset. So, I would never, if you only had some time and you only could get in here at sunset, I would definitely do it. It would be worth it. Or at late afternoon, I would definitely shoot here. 
But I think the ideal time is in the morning. But we’re going to show you two places, or three places. You can make your pick. The closest one to the entrance, which is only about 15 minutes from, Ruby’s Inn, which is where we’re staying, is just easy to get to. Beautiful sunrise. And we’ll talk a little bit more about what makes that interesting, what makes it interesting, what makes that work. So, all right, we’re going to find ourselves a spot. We’re going to get started here. We’re going to look at Sunrise Point.
So, we’re here at Sunrise Point. It’s exactly what it means. People come up here to watch the sunrise. But it’s a beautiful place to shoot Bryce from because the sun comes up off to my left and it just starts to glow into this valley and it’s just absolutely beautiful. 
This little bowl here that has all the hoodoos in it, it’s just a beautiful warm light in the morning. We got here at like 5:30 am. That was super early. I started to get some nice images about 5:45 almost 6:00ish, but they’re very soft. It’s almost like that sky becomes a soft box. It’s just, it glows and it gives you a highlight in the shadow side, but it’s a very soft, very, very slow transition. 
But then just as the sun came up, that started like 6:10 am, the sun came up, started to get some nice highlights in there, and that looked really nice as well. But almost a few minutes after sunrise before this looked really nice. It just had a nice soft light. You see nice highlights and shadows. It was a beautiful image at that point. 
I’m shooting at f/8. I like f/8 when I’m out like this because it’ll give me plenty of depth of field. I’m shooting manual, but I’m rolling my, I’m just changing my shutter. And I’m always running about a third under. I like it to be one third under. 
It just gives the color nice rich color, great density in the image. And also I use single point focus. I’m going to sit there and put the focus on where I want it to be sharp, critically sharp. And that just makes it so I I know exactly how the depth of field is going to play in the image. Which is generally pretty open. Pretty I mean, I’m wanting everything pretty much in focus. But if I only had 30 minutes to an hour, I’d zip out here to Sunrise Point and I’d shoot into that group of hoodoos behind me. I think it’s a beautiful place. You can make great arguments about a lot of places here. Bryce Point is great. Also, Sunset Point is really pretty. But I think the best light and the best morning shot here is at Sunrise Point.
You know, sometimes it’s a lot of fun. I just put the 70-180mm on, Tamron 70-180mm and it’s just fun because now I can reach out and isolate some of the interesting things here and there’s some beautiful images here. It’s got all the smoke in the valley. 
You see the different kind of outcroppings and the mesas. It’s really pretty. It’s just fun to do, shoot away. So just before we’re done, I mean the sun’s kind of hit all this. It doesn’t have the kind of beautiful warmth that it has before. 
But you know if you only have 30 minutes to an hour to shoot here, come right to this point in the morning. This is the place to come in the morning. Afternoon, you’re probably going to want to do sunset and shoot on that point. 
We’re going to shoot over there this evening. So, I’ve been shooting several of these on the Sunrise Point and the sun came up. I was shooting two images that I’m going to stitch together because I just want a little bit of a wider view. It won’t be too much, but I just want to stitch those two images together. So, here’s a couple of those that are stitched together.
Here is Sunset Point, but this is just around the corner from Sunrise Point looking into this group here. That works great for sunrise as well. I’ve shot here several times. Got beautiful images here as the sun comes up. Just a gorgeous place to shoot. 
If I showed up here in the middle of the day and I wanted to get a place to get some nice images, I would go to sunset point because you can look towards sunrise point and you can look back towards inspiration point and it gives you views that regardless of where the light is during the day, you can get some beautiful images. 
So, if you’re hitting this during the middle of the day, that’s where I would go. If you’re going to do sunrise, I would do Sunrise Point. If you’re going to do sunset, I’d probably come here to Sunset Point. So, this sunset point is really beautiful, but we’re shooting early here. It’s only 6:30 pm. It’s 6:00 pm. So, it’s almost two and one half hours before the sun goes down. 
But there’s heavy clouds today. So, you get just a soft, beautiful light in there. So, the timing over here really can vary depending on the light. It’s soft enough right now that it just gives us a nice highlight, a nice shadow. It looks beautiful. I’ve got a polarizer on to knock the blue down in the background. It looks really nice. I don’t need to use a gradient because the polarizer knocks the blue down. So, well, there’s more shape looking this direction, which is looking back towards inspiration point. If we look back towards sunrise point, it’s a lot more flat looking right now. 
So, here’s some images from Sunset Point looking back towards Inspiration Point. Beautiful highlight into shadow. Now, I’m going to take a look back towards Sunrise Point from Sunset Point.
When we come to Bryce, we usually stay at Ruby’s Inn. And there’s just a very simple reason. It’s like 8 minutes out of the park and there’s food here. The accommodations are fairly reasonable. They have camping. They have RV camping. Then they have hotel rooms. So, it’s just an easy place to stay. You can stay in the park, too. They have cabins in the park. Those sometimes tend to be a little more expensive. So, we’ve usually chosen Ruby’s Inn. So, like when we did Sunrise at Sunrise Point, we got up and left here and within about like 15 minutes, we were at the point. Maybe 17 minutes at the point ready to shoot. So, it’s really close and easy to shoot here a the major places you’re going to go to. And if you’re with your family and your family’s going to sleep in, you can jump up and run and do sunrise and be back before they ever wake up. Time for breakfast. So, Ruby’s Inn. We’ve always liked it here.
So, I went into the visitor center store here and at Bryce National Park, I found these. They’re mini building blocks, kind of like mini Legos. I am not sponsored by these things at all, but I think they’re pretty cool. There’s Thor’s hammer, mini building, mini Lego, mini building blocks. And they even have Bryce Canyon Lodge. So, those are really fun. You can find them in a lot of National Parks. I’m not sponsored by these guys, but I am a nerd.
So, I want to just quickly talk about the probably three or four different places you can photograph here in Bryce that really make the most sense to me. As I was driving in, I talked about Sunrise Point. It’s definitely the closest to accommodations. What’s interesting about Sunrise Point is the hoodoos come right up to you. So, you get that perspective of hoodoo right up to the point and then the deep background of the hoodoo and that bowl and then you get some trees and some mesas off in the distance. So, I think it’s a beautiful view. But everyone you talk to will have a different opinion about these on which one they think are the are the best or which is, better. So, that’s Sunrise Point. You walk around to Sunset Point. It’s good looking back towards Sunrise Point in the afternoon. And it’s going to give you beautiful, just beautiful hoodoos and they’re fairly close to you. Here’s the image we got at Sunrise Point.
So, you can take a look at that for a reference point. Now, we go to Sunset Point. Sunset Point, you see it from Sunrise Point. It’s actually in your photograph as you’re shooting. If you want to do sunrise there, you want to walk off the point a little bit over to the right and look not back towards Sunrise Point, but towards Inspiration Point. Now, there’s hoodoos right there. They’re very close to you and you get a beautiful sunrise image there. The scale of things there is beautiful in that bowl. I’ve photographed that bowl many times. A pretty place to take a picture. It’s a tiny bit further in, but the walk to get to it is much shorter. Sunrise Point, you pull up here and you’ve got a tiny walk, maybe two minutes, three minutes. But at Sunset Point, you park right there. And especially in the morning, if you go at 6:00 a.m., you’re, you know, just a few hundred feet away from your car. So, that’s a great place. Those are the two easiest, most accessible. As you go down further, and the hoodoos are close to you there, so you get a good scale there, but it’s just it’s all hoodoos. You’re looking into that bowl. Hoodoo’s, round circle in that bowl. Here’s an image we took there at Sunset Point in the morning. And here’s an image we took at Sunset Point in the evening.
Now we go down to Inspiration Point. Inspiration Point was just up too high for me. Everything seemed below you, too far away. You didn’t get just the the magnitude and the grandeur of what the hoodoos look like and what Bryce is all about. So that one I found not my favorite place to shoot either sunrise or sunset, personally.
The next one, if you go down further, is really an interesting place. It’s called Bryce Point. Bryce Point looks back. It’s great for sunrise. Because it’s again all these things face east. So it’s coming, the sun’s coming up in the east. It’s opening up that whole bowl. It’ll slowly creep in. It’ll just give you beautiful images. If you’re there early and you watch the sun just before the sun comes up, you get a kind of a luminous, luminosity in the bowl there. It’s the sky becomes like a soft box. It’s just a soft light on the structures and a soft transition in the shadows. So, it’s really a soft light. It’s very pretty. If you wait till the sun just barely peaks up, it’ll start giving you some highlights on each of the hoodoos and makes it even more spectacular. 
I’m always shooting with a polarizer, always. And I’m also using a gradation to knock the sky down, just to give myself, you know, keep that sky under control. Something you could probably do later in post, which is fine, but I love doing it in camera just to be able to keep that control and see exactly what my image is going to be like. So, Bryce Point is a great choice. 
The difficult thing about Bryce Point is it’s out further. You’ve got to drive out there quite a bit further. So, it’s another 10 to 12 minutes into the park, deeper into the park. So if you’re coming from like Ruby’s Inn, it’s just a longer drive if you want to get out there for sunrise. It’s best for sunrise. You can get something at sunset. Most of these places at sunset are going to be not when the sun actually sets. At that point, it’s long done. It’s going to be 30 or 40 minutes before the sun sets and you just get some nice soft light in there. It changes all the time. 
We’re having a different experience here right now because there’s fires going on and those fires are creating a little bit of warmth and also they’re just not giving us a very strong highlight as the sun starts to go down. So, every time is different, every situation is different. But there’s a look at the points along here.
We’re on this journey. We want to photograph 100 national and state parks in the United States and some in Canada. I want to put together, I want to shoot all of these. I want to be able to have this as my bucket list. I photographed an iconic image in every one of the 100 most photographed parks, national and state parks. So, join me in that journey. Take a look below at the link. It’ll take you to the link of all the names of these parks. Start shooting. I’m going to start making books of each of them after I get 20 of my first 20 parks. I’ll put it into a book, tabletop book, so I can show my images for the first 20 parks. I want you to join me in that as well. So, join us in this ride. It’ll be a lot of fun.
So, in this journey photographing these national parks and doing landscapes, I carry four lenses. That’s a lot, I know, but I carry the trinity. I’ve got here the 16-30mm from Tamron, the G2. I’ve got a 28-75mm G2 and I’ve got the 70-180mm G2. That gives me a great range. When I shot at Sunrise Point this morning, I jumped onto that 70-180mm and I got some isolated shots of just the smoke and the valley and everything. It was really beautiful. Here’s some of those images. 
It was just beautiful to get on that longer lens and to be able to isolate some of the landscape with that longer lens. But also go if we’re going down into the hoodoos, I want to shoot Thor’s hammer. 
I’m going to get on that 16-30mm. That’s going to give me a wider view. I can be right down in around things and it gives me a spectacular view. Sometimes that 28-75mm just gives me the right amount. It just reaches out enough somewhere in that 50mm range. And that’s the lens I carry, the fourth lens.
So the 50mm I’ve got with me right now is the Zeiss Otus f/1.4 50mm. It’s their new version. And that’s a beautiful, beautiful lens. And sometimes I will shoot and stack those together. If I want something that’s just a certain kind of look, if I want a certain kind of shadow, that lens looks really beautiful. So, it just depends on where I’m shooting. But most of the time, I’m on the 16-30mm or the 28-75mm.
So, I want to wrap this up. First off, just listen to that. There’s just something about the wind in the trees. It just feels so wonderful being out and about. It’s just an amazing sound. Anyway, let’s wrap this lesson up. If you only have 30 minutes to an hour in Bryce National Park, I would go directly to Sunset Point. 
At Sunset Point, you can shoot either to your left or to your right. Depending on the time of day, you’ll get a great shot. It’s great at sunrise. It’s great at sunset. And so, it gives you a beautiful image. Now, sunset’s not amazing in Bryce. It’s better off in the morning. If I had my way, I’d try to get here early and I would shoot at sunrise point and look back into the bowl. It’s looking back towards Sunset Point. It’s a beautiful image. 
Bryce Point is also a great place in the morning because you get that light coming in from the east. It opens up that bowl. It just looks fabulous. Sunset is not amazing, but this is an amazing place to do astrophotography. If you hit it the time of the month when there’s no moon, it’s just a gorgeous place to shoot. Or we’ve shot the moon coming up here before as it comes up on the horizon. That’s been beautiful as well. 
So, get an app by like Photopills that’s going to give you all that information.But if I only had 30 minutes to an hour in Bryce National Park, I would go immediately to Sunset Point. I’d get my shots there. Then I’d probably hike down and get a shot of Thor’s hammer because I just think it’s cool. So, there’s a look at Bryce Canyon National Park. And make sure you join us in this journey. We’re going to shoot 100 national parks. National and state parks in the United States and Canada. Get the list below in the link. We’re going to get started so you get started. Let’s keep those cameras rollin’ and let’s keep on clickin’!
