Shooting the Shooter - June Adventure
At the risk of spilling the beans about our June adventure, I decided to post a shooting-the-shooter segment from the trip because each of the images I made at the time Ann photographed me carry on the theme about compositions that I discussed in a recent post.
Our first morning was spent at the South Beach at Cape Arago. The tide was low, so Ann and I had pushed out as far as possible into the exposed rocks. There, a cacophony of sea plant life awaited us. The question for me was how to bring some order to it in an image.
For this image I was using my new 80mm macro lens that Ann got me for my birthday. My main purpose in wanting that lens is to copy all of my older black and white negatives, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it out in the field. Face it, the copy work is the type of thing you do on a rainy winter day, not on one of the first weekends of summer. (Yes, the overcast skies and mist you see in the background is not unusual for a “summer” morning on the Oregon coast!). Here, this lens allowed me to frame images much tighter than I can with my other lenses.
As I studied the various plants on the rocks, I eventually realized there was a lot of diversity, even among similar-looking plants. One particular type of plant consistently caught my eye because of the pearlescent sheen it would take under the diffuse light. Then I started noticing a real variation in the base color of the plants, ranging from a very, very deep reddish brown, to a dark purplish red.
When I came across a clump that included some lighter brown-based leaves intermixed with the other colors, I knew it was time to stop and pay attention to this subject. It took a bit of work but . . . .
And yes, this is the same image that I compared to abstract expressionism in the previous post. It goes to show just how different the same image can be in black and white and in color.
A short while later I wound up at the rock where I had thought I would be spending most of my time on that morning. It took me a long while to get there, but that's where I wound up.
While it’s not overly large, the rock has a wealth of potential. Not only has it been shaped by the constant pounding of the ocean over the millennia, if one looks closely you see that it’s a geologic encyclopedia (or should I say geologic wikipedia?).
One can see different layers in the rock - often noticeable by different colors - and that some layers wear faster than others to expose the different stones and fossils embedded for these many years. It’s not just an amazing rock to photograph, it’s also amazing to examine.
The next morning we wound up at Bandon, at a very different part of the beach than the one we frequented last Christmas. Instead of overcast, this morning was clear, but no less misty along the shore. Which gave us that incredible morning light we’ve experienced time and time again at Bandon except softened somewhat by the mist.
I wound up working on the composition theme that focuses on the play of light on water, around a simple subject. If you look at the water in the image below, you can see why I was drawn to working on this theme - the colors of the light on the water was amazing and was constantly changing.
If you look carefully, you can see the tripod is fully extended and the camera is well above my head height.
I needed that height to increase the separation between the three rocks in the image below.
What’s so nice about the image that Ann made of me at Bandon is that it tells so much about the part of the beach we stayed at that morning as well as the incredible light conditions we were gifted. From that one image you can pretty much see everything I photographed that morning. All except the compositions out in the ocean!