Photography From Five Feet Apart

I’ve made snide comments on at least a couple of previous occasions about iconic locations where photographers will line up all in a row, seemingly about to take the same photograph.  For us, it was like that when we were at Oxbow Bend at Grand Tetons National Park, and was the reason we bypassed the packed parking lot at Zabreski Point in Death Valley to opt for photographing at 20 Mule Team Road, all by ourselves, earlier this year.  That said, I’m honest enough to admit the hypocrisy of this post and its main point.  Still, while each photographer in that row of photographers may be making their own image, it’s a lot better to be photographing all on our own.  Even then, we sometimes wind up photographing from five feet apart. 

I’ve included a couple of images from our trip where we wound up in close proximity to each other while making images, but for very different reasons.

The first was on our Slough Creek hike where the trail drops down to get a sliver of a view of the creek through the trees.  As you can see below, we were so close together that the legs of our tripods were crossed.  Another thing worth noting, adding to the point that two photographers can have very different visions, is that Ann and I have equivalent focal length lenses (35mm - similar to a classic 50mm lens) on our cameras.  And for your information, the camera with the red camera strap is Ann’s.

From the above image, you can see how dense the trees were up to that point, and the image below shows the opening in the trees we were working with.  

So, how different can two images be when the cameras are about 4 feet apart and you’re using the same focal length lenses.  Quite a bit it seems.

The most obvious thing is that Ann’s image is in black and white.  Also, she stuck with the traditional landscape orientation, which really accentuates the flow of Slough Creek as it winds its way through the image. 

We were fortunate to have roaming clouds that would cast shadows that would pass through the field of view.  Ann chose an image that had shadowing to the left and the right of the main rock structure, which tonally brings that out in black and white.  

My image is in color and it’s square.  Given that it loses 1/3 of the frame area by going square, my image accentuates the rock structure while still keeping the bend of the creek in the frame.

The next pair of images are from our campsite at Kodachrome Basin State Park.  The previous evening, as we headed down to the restroom, the far ridge was just glowing with an amazing light to it.  It was 7:18 (I checked my watch).  When I commented on it Ann asked, “Do you want to get your camera and make an image?”  I said, “No, it’s supposed to be the exact same condition tomorrow night, I’ll make the image then.”  Well, of course it wasn’t - once again I didn’t follow my adage that if there is an image to be made, make it - there are no guarantees of another opportunity to get a special light condition.

In any event, we set up the next night, and realized that the skies had a layer of dust in them that wasn’t present the day before.  We weren’t going to get that crystal clear brilliance we had the night before, but we could tell that the skies were going to be something special anyway.  I took the image below of our cameras early on in the photography session.  We’re a bit farther apart this time, but since we were focusing on a distant subject, it didn’t matter.  Also, early on I was making square images, which is why my camera was mounted horizontally.  Later, that would change.

As with the previous image, Ann was still focusing a lot on black and white image making (often as you can see on her LCD screen above, she would even set the LCD to show in black and white).  The image has a lovely high-key, soft tonality of grays that belies arguments that you can’t capture the subtlety of light in black and white.

This time we didn’t, and couldn’t, have the same lenses on our cameras.  Ann had the 100-400mm monster zoom, I had the 55-200mm zoom.  Both lenses let us  zoom in substantially in making our images.  Ann wound up zooming in a bit tighter than I did.

The whole latter part of the trip I was captivated by the coloring of the sky early in the morning/late in the day and and how it affects colors in the desert.  That’s what I found appealing that evening, as well as the shadowing and textures on the ridge.  Thus I had to include that lovely line that drops down and across the lower half of the frame, and to make the image a rectangular vertical to emphasize that line.

Even with the same tight framing and vertical composition, there still is quite the difference between Ann’s photographs and mine.  

That fact still doesn’t change my attitude about being part of a firing squad of photographers.  Give me a beautiful place where Ann and I can be alone in our work any day. Even if we still wind up photographing from five feet apart.