Interlude - Phoenix Buttress
Well, things have gotten so hectic lately that Ann and I are on another photo trip long before I’ve finished the 2018 Grand Fall Adventure posts. I promise I’ll get back to them, but given I’m sitting in a time-share with the photographs I’ve taken from this morning on my laptop, I figured it would be better to share a blog post with you now than to hold off and keep things in sequence. So here are some images I took Saturday morning of Phoenix Buttress at Smith Rocks State Park.
A client generously offered the use of his Eagle Crest time-share to Ann and me, so we decided that spending a long holiday weekend away from home would be nice, even if I did have to work on Friday and a bit on Saturday while we were here. Eagle Crest is near Redmond on the eastern side of the Cascades and not far from Smith Rocks State Park as well as all the potential photo locations around Bend. We decided that our first couple of mornings’ shoots would be at Smith Rocks.
When one goes out photographing, sometimes a particular subject grasps you and you wind up making image after image of that same subject. That’s what happened to me today, and I can’t say I’m disappointed with the results. Consequently, this blog post consists solely of images of Phoenix Buttress. Importantly, the only thing I photographed this morning was the Phoenix Buttress (though as you’ll see, a wide variety of image types). It’s not quite a “working the image” approach, because they are different images made for different reasons. They’re just of the same subject - not a sequence of images to build up to how to best photograph a subject. In any event, these were all made in a morning where Ann and I took our time photographing in the freezing cold (at 24 degrees this morning, we were thankful that we brought our winter parkas on this trip) with no real agenda for the day other than to photograph.
For the second day running, Ann and I arrived a bit later than we’d expected. This morning’s delay was caused by having to walk down the trail in near-darkness. By the time we reached the bottom of the climb down, the morning glow was well on its way and we decided to stop and make photographs from where we were instead of heading down the trail (way down the trail) to where I thought I wanted to be. We were following the simple advice of stopping to photograph when you see something interesting because you never know if your destination will be good as you think it will be.
While my first image was what I’d originally envisioned, I thought that a vertical image with a tighter crop on the side might also be interesting and would give for larger subjects in the image.
Just as we’d experienced the morning before, the light transitioned to a pinkish/purple and everything seemed to glow. Which meant Ann and I were sticking in this general location for the all-to-short duration of the early morning light and I would continue to work on making different images of the same subject.
And while I looked around several times to see if there were other images I might want to make, nothing other than the Phoenix Buttress grabbed my interest.
As I tend to do, my vision led me to focus in tighter and tighter on the subject. Still, I’d told myself to try and make more landscape images, so even with a tight framing, I tried to include some context to the fascinating face of Phoenix Buttress.
And then I went the opposite direction and went wide, trying to also capture the feeling of being surrounded by cliff-faces.
Eventually the sun broke over the horizon and light streamed across the rock faces. The contrast between the sunlit faces and the lower elevations was too great for how I was feeling about the subject so it was time for me to stop. Ann also felt the same way about it, so we decided to head on over to where I originally thought I wanted to start the day.
We crossed the river and headed down river, eventually climbing up to the part of Smith Rocks where most of the rock climbing routes are. From there I was hoping to have a clear view of a field by the bend in the river as it turns to pass under Phoenix Buttress. Unfortunately, trees on our side of the river obscured our view and made a strong image impossible (no, I’m not about to climb 100’ up a vertical wall to get a clear shot of the field, river and Phoenix Buttress - rope or no rope).
Ann said she wanted to try a couple of images anyway so I decided I would abandon my hopes for a landscape image and work on tight crops of the now sunlit buttress. Most of the images are not nearly as pleasing as the ones I’d made earlier, but they were fun to make. Given the stark contrasts, they work very well in black and white.
As well as in color.
There you have it. A nice relaxing morning taking our time making photographs of a subject that wouldn’t let me go under lovely, changing light. Sure, there was race that morning so folks eventually came running by, and screaming kids disturbed the overall silence of this beautiful place on a couple of occasions, but we had a great time and that’s what matters. Oh yeah, and we made some nice images.