
"Hoop Dancing With Ghosts, Coalmine Canyon, Navajo/Hopi Joint Use Area, Arizona" (c) 2012 Stu Jenks
Here's what you are supposed to do, though nothing bad will happen to you if you don't. Thousands now haven't done this one thing and I'm assuming they are still alive. It's perhaps just a superstition. Or maybe not.
A good friend was studying with a Navajo medicine man years ago. His teacher told my friend that before you enter Coalmine Canyon you should always ask permission of the Spirits. My friend then told me. Over the last 25 years of coming here, I have asked. Sometime it says no. Most times it say yes. Night before last, I forgot to ask all together until after I had entered.
"Oh," I said to the Canyon, in the fading twilight, "Sorry. I forgot. Can I come in?
"Sure," said the Canyon, "but do not spend the night. Leave before 10 p.m."
"No kidding," I said. "Leave before 10?"
And the Canyon said nothing else.
OK.
I shot for four hours and was back on pavement by 10 p.m.
On full moon nights, Navajo and Hopi holy men alike say that ghosts dance on the walls of the Canyon. I believe they did Wednesday night.
(Geek note: I've had this happen before, shooting at night with black and white film, but never with a color digital negative.The above image is a perfect exposure, at least for my tastes. The length of time, the saturation of the color, the whites and blacks, lights and darks and midtones, and other colors are just, well, perfect. I fiddled with the image for about 15 minutes in CS5, but always came back to the original digital negative. So what you see here is precisely what is on the neg. All I did was cropped the neg a hair, rotate the image 2 degrees to the right and put a black line around the whole thing. Now, don't get me wrong. I did this hoop dance about 7 times to get the Christmas light circles right, but that was for the structure of the five hoops. I just educated-guessed on the density, on the exposure time, and lo and behold, I got it just right on the best dance of the night. It's never happened before with a digital negative. I consider that a very good sign, from a very good night of hoop dancing with ghosts at Coalmine Canyon.)