Before Royce Bair became the director of The Stock Solution photo agency, he was an illustrative photographer specializing in unique lighting. He lectured internationally with a program called, "Drawing With Light". IIn 1981 he embarked on a personal project he called, "NightWork" that continues to this day. His goal was to artificially light some of the largest and most well known natural formations in the western United States.

Because Royce brings his own "sun", he has virtually complete control over the coloring and shading of the formations he chooses to photograph. Most formations were photographed about an hour after sunset and illuminated with many strategically placed electronic flash units. While all the units are battery powered, they have been specially designed with tremendous output -- each unit has enough power to light a football field.

In most cases, Royce radios an assistant at the camera to open the camera's shutter for a 10 minute time exposure (this is to expose the night sky). During this time, Royce fires several flash units that have been placed around (and sometimes behind) the formation he is illustrating. Many careful exposure calculations are made during the previous day, because Royce only makes ONE exposure onto 35mm Kodachrome 64 film, and ONE exposure onto 6cm x 7cm Kodacolor 400 negative film. Both exposures are made at the same time, using two different cameras.

Now that Royce has gone digital, he only uses one camera (a Canon EOS 5D), but still only takes one picture per night. Because long exposures produce high amounts of digital "noise", the camera is programmed to take a second exposure, which is compared by the camera's processor with the first exposure. In this process, many of the noise artifacts are cancelled from the first exposure before it is saved to the memory card -- a process that can sometimes take up to an hour!

Lighting these large formations can be very challenging. For instance, Rainbow Bridge, the world's largest natural bridge, has a height of 309 feet; Landscape Arch has the longest span of 291 feet; and Delicate arch can only be reached on foot after a 1.5 mile hike.

All formations, except Devil's Tower are void of computer manipulation. Cloud cover over the tower, on a moonlit night, washed out the sky, forcing the photographer to substitute a sky created with PhotoShop.