Shooting the Shooter - Flailing Arms at the Portland Japanese Gardens

A couple of weekends ago Ann and I finally made it to the Portland Japanese Garden, in part to photograph and in part to see a joint exhibit of Michael Kenna’s photographs and Japanese Viewing Stones being held at the Garden.  With no winter snow storm warning in the forecast this time, we got up nice and early and made the drive up to Portland so we would arrive right as the garden opened for members hours.  That gave us two hours to photograph before the crowds started arriving.  And, it gave Ann an opportunity to make one of the more unusual Shooting the Shooter images she’s made.  

The day started with a light fog in the air, but after about an hour and a half the fog started thinning to allow the sun to start shining through the veil.  That’s when this image was made.  I’d positioned myself at the bottom of a path on the lower part of the garden and had set up to photograph some moss on the lower part of a tree trunk.  If you look carefully, you can see my tripod legs at the bottom of the steps.  I’m . . . I’m the two arms sticking out on either side of the tree trunk.

Now you might ask, why am I behind the tree while my tripod is in front of it?  Isn’t this supposed to be a shooting the shooter blog post?  Well, I was, in fact, taking a photograph at the time Ann made her image of me.  Let’s just say I was happy that my camera has a 10-second timer delay because it took me a bit to position myself just right.

The image below is the one I made when Ann photographed me.  You can see that some sunlight is striking the central-left part of the image.  What I was doing was balancing my body such that the torso covered part, but not all of the light being cast on the tree, with my left arm extended out to block another part of the sunlight.  My right arm was sticking out on the other side of the tree just to keep myself from falling over.  Yes, from a distance, I probably looked like a total fool. (But what else is new?)

So why was I engaged in a balancing act while my 10-second timer did its countdown?  Well, as you can see below, the sunlight cast an excessive glow along the entire right side of the tree.  Like many things photographic, to the eye the tree had this lovely transition of light that was very pleasing.  It wasn’t until I made my first image that I realized there really was an unpleasing light strip down the right hand side.  

Instead of giving up on the image, I decided to try and fix it.  Thus, I switched my timer from 2 seconds to 10 seconds and experimented to see if I could block some of the sunlight without totally losing the sense of light that first attracted me to the image.

Was my balancing act worth it?