The Grand Canyon of Oman
First of all, sorry for the lack of updates over the last few days, but I was away in Oman camping for 3 nights. We started our camping trip with the first night spent high up in the Hajar Mountains close to Jebel Shams, the highest peak in this region. Jebel Shams, towers above everything else at little over 3,000 meters, while below lies the second deepest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon in the USA.
The temperature here was about half of the one at sea level, so this is a pleasant camping spot even during the hot Arabian summer. There are well marked hiking trails that take you all the way up to the top of Jebel Shams, as well as a couple of very well placed observation points along the winding road.
The photograph below was taken from one of these observation points and is a panorama made out of 2 tone-mapped images. Each of these images was tone-mapped in Photomatix from 7 exposures because the dynamic range between the sky and the depths of the canyon was quite high and I needed quite a few exposures to cover the entire range. I then blended back in the original sky, which in the tone-mapped versions was looking way too unrealistic.
On an unrelated matter, I wanted to let you know that this Friday (9th of April) I will take part in the Arte Souk event at Times Square in Dubai, where some of my images printed on high-quality stretched canvas will be for sale in three different sizes: 12″x12″, 16″x12″ and 28″x16″.