Shooting the Shooter - White Pocket

We have a curve ball for you today.  For once the shooting the shooter photograph isn’t of me, it’s of Ann!  Join us to check out Ann’s image from our visit to White Pocket in 2019.

Lately I’ve been going through my Capture One catalogs, unfortunately in a haphazard way, but nonetheless going through my date folders (in part to label the locations for each of the dates) and skimming through those images.  Sometimes I’ll stop to work on an image, but often not. 

Well, this past weekend I was working my way through my images from White Pocket and came across an image of Ann!

Now, White Pocket is an interesting place.  Not only is it difficult to get to (see the story from the trip and the need to dig/MaxTrax out of sand pits), with most people paying a guide to 4x4 them out there, but it’s a stunningly beautiful place.  And that’s part of the problem.  Like so many fascinating places, the beauty is so overwhelming that it seems like everywhere you point your camera there’s an incredible image.  But it’s only when you get home that you realize that you really didn’t make images that fully reveal the real beauty or character of the place.  Like so many places (and Ann and I have talked about this), White Pocket is one of those places that really should be visited repeatedly, and probably requires that before the real photographs come.  Yes, you’ll get an interesting image or two from a quick trip there, but getting the character of the place . . . that’s a different story.

That’s the long way of saying that, as I looked through my images, I was getting increasingly depressed (maybe they’re better than I thought - sometimes you have to go back and look at them again, but that can be doubly painful as well).  So when I came across the image of Ann, that freed me to break away from my own images, hopeful that she had an interesting paired image.

And, of course, she did.  Actually, I hadn’t realized that her camera was pointed to the left instead of straight ahead in the photograph above, but that makes sense.  Ann’s head is shielding the rear LCD screen from the sun by standing where she’s at, and if she had stood “behind” the camera, she would have put herself in a position to fall down the hill (. . .  I’m holding my tongue about whether or not I would have laughed at the sight of that).

Thus I was particularly taken when I saw the image of the larger rock to the left. 

In grand Ann fashion it’s a beautiful complex landscape image.  It takes advantage of the interestingly lit foreground bushes, and then utilizes the rock formation to flow to the prominent outcrop, with the distant bluff as a backdrop.  

I’m not sure if Ann would have worked on this image had I not asked her to (based on the time-stamp of my image).  I think these shooting the shooter images, which cull from our work not based on our own preferences, but by the happenstance that one of us decides to take a photograph of the other, provide us with a reminder of why we photograph.  It shows that we’re constantly working to make significant images and that even images that aren’t what we might consider our best, can be lovely images of beautiful places.  

Sometimes that is all the reminder one needs to go back and carefully review the older work.  Approaching it with the prospect (call it hope) that there is something you missed the last time you went through the images, and came away totally depressed.