“I see lines and shapes everywhere,” says Ann Arbor, Michigan-based fine art photographer Lucia Cooper. But it was a “special love for curves” that led her to create a series of photographs of Arizona’s Antelope Canyon.

Why black and white: A lover of geometry, Cooper felt black-and-white photography would allow her to best highlight both the parallel lines formed by sedimentation and the curves created by erosion. “I also decided to go quite low-key to put the special emphasis on the places where the light hit, particularly on the edges of the rocks.”

The flowing fabric effect: “The phrase ‘flowing fabric’ perfectly describes what I was seeing in Antelope Canyon,” Cooper says. To convey that in her work, she used the blur tool in Photoshop to smooth the curved areas of the rocks while leaving the edges of the rock sharp. “The tricky part was not to blur everywhere.”

The equipment: Unable to find a photography-focused tour of the canyon, Cooper joined a tour group led by a guide whose pace left no time for camera setups. So, Cooper made photos quickly using her iPhone in raw, focusing on closeups of lines and shapes.

The challenge: Antelope Canyon is one of the most photographed places in the world, so it was a challenge to create works that hadn’t already been seen before. “It took me years to come up with the idea of selectively blurring my images and get up the nerve to go low-key,” she says. “The bottom line is that I love beauty, and to me, these images are beautiful.”

Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.