Shooting the Shooter - October 4, 2019
You’re probably saying to yourself, “Hey, it’s not October 4th, that was almost a month ago!” You’re right, but that was the day our shooting the shooter images for today come from. It was a rather incredible day, beginning and ending with photography, and with a whole lot of overland driving in-between. One of our images comes from pre-dawn and the other from after sunset. So let’s see what kind of day it was!
The started the morning making the short drive from Kodachrome Basin State Park to Grosvenor Arch in the dark. Fortunately, we’d scouted the location we wanted to photograph from the previous afternoon and Ann was able to easily find the picnic table to use to gain some elevation for her images. Unlike Charlie Waite, we don’t travel with a step ladder in our vehicle, so sometimes we have to get a bit creative to gain a bit of height.
By the time I pulled out my iPhone to make an image of Ann, we had been photographing for quite awhile. Ann had taken her wider photographs and had started making tighter-cropped images of the arch and surrounding structure. It also meant that the sun was beginning to give the arch some shape even though it was still below the horizon.
We photographed until well after the sun was blasting Grosvenor Arch with sunlight, pleased with a lovely morning of photographing all alone.
As you know from the previous post, we then drove down Cottonwood Canyon Road, a beautiful drive in itself that warrants a visit at some point (despite the power lines) to photograph, and eventually wound up at Alstrom Point on the edge of Lake Powell and then backtracked a bit just in time to have a lovely evening shoot.
Our location was right at the transition between the Glen Canyon Recreational Area and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument as the evening darkness was really starting to settle in and our exposure times were rapidly growing longer and longer.
The location is, really, nothing special, at least if you’re there during the day. It’s at the edge of the first of the 5 geologic steps that make the “staircase,” with a rolling landscape before the first step. As far as we know, it’s on nobody’s photographic “bucket list” (a term I utterly despise - as if you’ve failed in life if you don’t check everything off your list, or that the only things of value are those on the list), with the “great locations” both well before and well past where we wound up that evening. Yet it’s exactly the type of location we love to be at - a sculptural landscape under lovely light. What more can you ask for?
Oh, I guess you can ask to be there all alone. Which we were!
In some ways I like Ann’s image that includes me better than mine. I think it captures the type of vast, open landscape that Ann and I love be in, under the lovely edge-of-the-day light that we love to make photographs. Us, alone, in that type of landscape - it really doesn’t get better than that!
October 4, 2019 was quite the day.