Shooting the Shooter - Goblin Valley State Park 2019-09-26

No, Ann and I haven’t managed to get out for a serious photo session in Portugal, but that doesn’t keep us from drawing on old themes for a blog post.  This one comes from last Fall’s trip to Goblin Valley State Park in Utah, a place you really should visit if you’re ever out that way.

We were only able to get reservations for one night at the campground in the park (managing to squeeze in two showers during our stay!) and photographed for a single afternoon/evening and predawn/morning set of photo sessions after scouting out locations right after we arrived.

These images came from the evening session during that period as the sun sets and before night falls.  Some call it the blue hour, which of course it is, but it’s also a period where the richness of the desert colors seem to come to life.  

We’d stayed on top of a Ridgeline to get some elevation from which to separate the hoodoos from the background.  Towards the end of our shooting session, Ann managed to photograph me with part the main hoodoo area as my background, now shadowed by the mountains to the west.

Me, well I’m doing what I often do during these rapidly changing light conditions - photographing as quickly as I possibly can.  When I work, I usually have a vest with very large pockets.  I set down my bag and often grab several lenses, put them in different pockets and switch them around while remaining at the tripod.  If you can’t tell, I have a lens in my left hand, waiting for the exposure to complete (my image was a 7.5 second exposure) before I swap lenses for a different image.  As you can see, I didn’t have much of an area to move around for different shots, and the light was changing too quickly to change locations.

Still, in all I made 7 distinctly different images, using 2 different lenses, in three very different directions in a 12 minute period before the darkness forced me to call it quits.  The image below was taken at the same time, 7:38 pm, that Ann’s image above was and was made in the middle of that 12 minute period.

I was facing a different direction than Ann was because the last rays of sunlight were playing with the rocks in that direction.  Often, when I’m in a situation where I’m not sure what to photograph, I ask where is the light best, and then concentrate on what I can see there.  That was the case here - the light offered some texture here, but not in the area behind me.

In reality, the sun had already set and what I was getting was reflected sunlight from the underside of clouds that was enough to cast some shadows on the features (and landscape) to the north.  It didn’t last long, but it lasted long enough for me to get my image.