Shooting the Shooter - The Next Morning
“What?” you’re probably asking yourself. “The next morning? Doesn’t Ann ever take her own photographs?” Yes she does, but for some odd reason she often likes to point her lens in my direction (I know better than to do that in her direction too often), so we have another shooting the shooter. From the next morning. From pretty much the exact same location (we know this because we camped about a mile away, Beast has GPS and there was the same identifiable rock on the side of the road). So what was it like the next morning?
As the trip blog explained, the next morning was just as interesting as the previous evening, except that the light had a very different quality to it (as it should). There we were again at the foot of the Grand Staircase-Escalante, photographing in awe of the beauty before us.
If you look carefully, just to the left of my left tripod leg, you can see my camera bag. That’s often how we work, get to a good location, drop the bag and start shooting. We may move around 30 or 50 feet, eventually grabbing the bag if we really move to a new location, but usually finding the different images we can make during those precious few moments where the light becomes spectacular. My vest, and often the jacket I wear as well (not to mention the Fjallraven pants), have huge pockets, which means I often have multiple lenses on my body and in the black sling bag so I don’t waste time moving back and forth to get new lenses.
In preparing for this post, we realized that Ann and I had forgotten to synchronize our clocks. While the image from the previous post was easy to determine (I could see the LCD, see that it was a vertical rectangle, and that I had the prominent bluff off-set to the left), this one wasn’t. The image with roughly the same time stamp as Ann’s (differing by about 20 seconds) was definitely not the right image - I was pointing in an entirely different direction. Within an 8-minute period, I had made 6 distinct images and within three minutes of making this image, I had made 2 more. Fortunately, another one of Ann’s images showed me that my camera was mounted horizontally (how I usually mount it for horizontal and square images) and the only other image in this direction was framed vertically. Both before and after this set of images I was pointing towards my left.
So what was it that led me to swing my camera to the right (from where I had been photographing) to make an image that had no strong physical structure?
Why the sky, of course! As I was photographing more to the left and letting the long exposure do it’s thing, I glanced to the right and saw these skies. One of the things I truly love about wide open spaces at dawn is to watch the Earth’s shadow lower to the horizon, with the pink light of morning trailing behind, and the blue of day announcing its presence.
Despite the lovely red colors of the Escalante, the mysterious blue-grey sand dunes streaking out from the right, the diversity of forms on the landscape and the surprising vegetation of the foreground, that sense of “morning is here” is all this image is about.
In case you were wondering, this is the image that has the same clock time as Ann’s image:
It is more of a composed image than the one she photographed me making. And despite being taken earlier, does not reveal the earth’s shadow and appears to be taken later, with the brighter cliff-faces. Again, the geography of the place is at play. The rock face points towards the east, which has a clear, flat shot to Lake Powell, which then drops, and a very distant and low horizon. With my other image, the first step of the Escalante wraps around and presents a much higher horizon to block the sun for that image - thus the morning “glow” hasn’t reached the ridgeline yet (that occurred a few minutes later . . . after the Earth’s shadow dropped below the horizon).
That’s another thing that makes these morning so special, if you learn to pay attention, you can learn a lot. And be at a beautiful place at the same time. Oh yeah, and photograph as well!