Brice Creek 2014 , Shooting the Shooter

I guess being retired and locked down at home has some advantages.  Like culling through your old images to shrink the gigabyte size of your Capture One files.  At least that’s what Ann’s been doing lately while I’m working (all along totally ignoring my suggestion to work on some images for printing - avoidance behavior, even in retirement).  Well, the other day I get an e-mail from Ann with the subject line “Wild Water at Brice Creek” and a photograph of me from 2014.  Looking at the image, I immediately knew I had a corresponding image and therefore a shooting the shooter post.

Brice Creek was pretty much the closest place to our old home where we could return to photograph again and again, and that would offer us something new each time.  In part, that’s why we chose Braga to move to - it’s not far from Portugal’s only national park (there are other “natural areas” in the country), and we are hoping to find a Brice Creek equivalent here (if the pandemic would ever be done with so we can start exploring the area a bit).

Anyway, the image Ann sent me is just proof that I was right in my blog post about why I know Ann is a photographer.  Even when she is taking a picture of me, she still frames it into a nice photograph.  Then again, it could just have been that Ann set up for a lovely photograph and some idiot climbed into her photo and made her wait until he decided to be done (which, based upon that idiot’s bloated Capture One catalog was quite some time - face it, I was playing around with a wide range of exposure times, which meant I was changing filters, etc . . . but I digress).  Take the idiot out of the photograph and it’s a lovely, well composed landscape photograph! 

This photo outing came towards the end of the roughly 1-year period after my return from Liberia when I decided that I was going to photograph with just my x100 camera (the one I used in the streets of Zanzibar in the previous post).  Its fixed lens is equivalent to a 35mm lens on a 35mm film camera - a slight wide angle - which offers an angle of view that I love (and I think I naturally see in).  Not having to worry about changing lenses, I could focus on framing what was before me and, as it turns out that year, thinking about things such as the correct shutter speeds for different types of flowing water.

Thus, the time I spent on that rock was spent experimenting with how various shutter speeds rendered the flowing water.  Looking at the images (all framed similarly or with a slight adjustment), the shutter speeds ranged from 1/25 sec to 58 seconds.  The image below, taken within a half-minute of Ann’s photograph of me, was taken at 1/4.5 second.  Fortunately, it also seems to be the right shutter speed to capture the energy of the water that morning and was only a couple of frames away from an image I included in my ebook x100+1.  That’s why I recognized the scene immediately when Ann sent me her photograph.

I miss those mornings.  Days where we’d get up early, head to some near-by location and photograph until the sun came up and washed everything out.  Then we’d catch breakfast somewhere on the way home, and then get on with our day.  It was such a simple way of photographing.  Long (well, not so long) before we decided that we loved traveling to remote locations and spending weeks on the road photographing to our hearts’ content.

It pretty much proves that there are lots of ways to make interesting images.  And that it helps to live not far from a location like Brice Creek.