180
Lately Len and I have had a series of e-mail exchanges about photography. Like so many such conversations, it began with talking about gear. In time it moved to discussions about photographers and whose work we’re looking at now. Surprisingly, there was quite a bit of overlap, even among contemporary photographers we’d never talked about before. Finally, one day I sent him a photograph I had worked on from a recent trip just because I felt like it. In telling him a bit about the making of the image and what led up to it, it dawned on me that I might have a new series (like “photographing the photographer”, or “Dan’s cameras”) for my much neglected blog. I’m calling it 180 and it comes from a saying in photography circles that once you’ve made a photograph, turn around 180 degrees and see what else there is to photograph. I can’t remember when I first heard it (I know I’ve told Ann to try that), but most recently it crossed my path again in David DuChemin’s Making the Image Quick Reference Guide, sort of a cheat sheet of 35 questions to ask yourself when you’re photographing and you get stuck or need a creative nudge. Number 12 is “What’s behind me?”
So during our last trip to the Painted Hills, Ann and I got up early to photograph the early morning light. Ok, I forgot to set my phone alarm clock, which didn’t really matter much because I’d left the phone outside of my sleeping bag and the battery was drained nearly to zero because it was so cold that night. So and Ann and I overslept until . . . oh my goodness . . . it must have been 6:00 am! Anyway, we decided not to rush too much since pre-sunrise and sunrise was out of the question, so we made a pot of coffee and grabbed some yogurt and granola for breakfast as we headed out the short trip to the Painted Hills from Mitchell (a trip that will be much shorter once we have the Sportsmobile since we’ve found a couple of really great camping spots on BLM land right outside the monument). Surprisingly, the sun had just risen above a cloud bank on the horizon as we pulled into the park and we went directly to the area we knew we wanted to photograph that morning, having scouted it the day before.
Most of the photographs of the Painted Hills are of the side of the ridge that lies east of the main viewing area and faces west. The area we were interested in, and had photographed the night before, is in a valley that lies west of the viewing area. Consequently, that gave us the sun on our back to cast a golden glow on a near-by set of hills and helped create some interesting shadows.
After making the photographs I had thought about while scouting around, I started looking for more detailed images and saw a lone tree off in the distance in a depression in the ground. The sun had just risen enough so the whole tree was bathed in sunlight that skimmed over the mound off to its right. I put on my long zoom lens and made a couple of images, though felt a bit frustrated at not being able to truly separate the tree from the background.
After making this vertical image and a horizontal that included more of the hillside in shadow and the top-lit grasses I wondered what I should focus on now. That’s when it hit me - what’s behind me? I turned around and immediately saw two distinctly different images. After moving my tripod about 30 feet east, now on the other side of the trail, I had to decide which image to photograph first. Looking back and forth between them I decided that one was going to get better with more light hitting it, which meant the sun had to rise. And the other would lose more and more of the shadowing that sculpted the image as the sun rose. That answered my question - get the one now before the sun moves too much and the image is lost.
Again, it was a far-away image and I kept my zoom lens on the camera and focused on a portion of the hillside area that anyone who knows the Painted Hills is familiar with:
Once I was pretty sure I’d gotten what I wanted, I quickly focused on a sculpted portion of the hillside a bit to the north that was still mostly in shadow to find just the right collection of design elements. Once I found them it was a race against the sun as it was quickly rising and more and more of the hillside was awash with light.
That was it - three photographs in 20 minutes (well, actually 4 if you count the horizontal image of the tree). One facing west, the other two facing east. 180 degrees apart.
And in case you were wondering, it was the last image that I sent to Len.