Shooting the Shooter - Ibex Dunes

Coincidences are a strange thing.  They happen all the time, but they still give me pause to reflect whether there isn’t something greater behind them.  Not that coincidences have to be anything profound, the one behind this story is far from it, but still, they do make you wonder sometimes as to whether there is something behind why things happen when they do.

As you may or may not know, I often write my posts whenever they come to mind and sometimes they sit around awhile in the application (MacJournal) I write them in.  It may be because I’m not sure I’m ready to post the story yet, other times I’ve got them stacked up (blog post ideas often come in spurts, so I’ll write whenever I think of something I think is suitable) and they’re just waiting their turn to get posted.  Well, it was the latter situation in this case.  Oh yeah, one more point - I don’t always let Ann know what I’ve been writing about, or even that I’ve written something.  So she’ll get an e-mail just like you to find out what nonsense I’ve decided to write about.

With the above in mind, the other day I needed a little break from the brief I was writing for work and went upstairs to visit Ann.  She was at her desk, still working away (and making progress) on updating her Capture One catalogs.  As I walked in she said, “Hey, guess what I found?”  She was on the last days of 2018, during our trip to Death Valley, and she pulled up a shooting the shooter image (well, actually a walking shooter).  I couldn’t help but start laughing, and of course Ann looked at me as if I was going crazy (which probably happens a lot more than I care to admit).

You see, Ann hadn’t known that I’d done my last blog post (“And now for something completely different . . .”) or that the photograph she had taken of me was taken by her about 10 minutes after I’d made that image.  In fact, you can see the subject I photographed in that image below.  Can you find it? 

If you look at the part of the dune in the middle of the left edge of the frame above, you can see the lovely curve of shadow and light in the dune as it cuts and descends across the frame, with the bright dune above and behind that line.  Of course, you can’t see the small dune grass that’s in my image in the above (perhaps because it may already be in shadow), but you can see the play of light and shadow and lines that made up my image!

The more I look at Ann’s image the more I enjoy the memories it brings back and the story it tells about me and our time at Ibex Dunes in the southern part of Death Valley.  As you can see from the deep dune shadows, it’s late afternoon and not only is the sun starting to set, but the color of the light is starting to change.  Not too much yet, because the sky is still a natural blue, but you can see the additional warmth of an early evening sun across the landscape.  

And the image itself is a lovely image - I’m just a small part of it.  You can see the texture of the landscape, both the sand texture in the foreground, and the texture of the dune forms and the rocky hillside in the middle part of the image.  And then there is the texture of the clouds.  

And then there is the story of the photographer.  You can see my original footprints as I made my way up the fortune to drop my camera backpack (that black blotch in the dune).  It hints how I tend to work - find an interesting place, drop my bag, pull out my filters and lenses I think I’ll work with (loading the filters and a lens in a pouch I carry and the other lenses in my photography vest), and then I wander around that interesting place.  The image above was made in-between a series of photographs I made just up and over that dune (standing in the shadow area) and a few images I made from the area around my camera bag.  They were some of the last images we made in the dunes before heading on the too-long hike back to Beast.  Fortunately we made it back before it became totally dark (or too cold to bear).

So I’m going to post some before and after shots.  The image below was made just after the “And now for something completely different …” image.   As noted, you can see where I made that image in the photograph above.  For the blow image, imagine me turning 90 degrees counter clockwise and looking off to the left.  In that direction were a series of taller dunes (which Ann and I hope to return to photograph some day), which allowed me to make a series of photographs of the dune formations.

Earlier in the day I’d made some more “landscape” photographs in that direction, in part because the details of the dunes were not as revealed as they became with the setting sun.  The sad part about the setting sun is that it sets quickly, which meant I did not have a lot of time to dwell on any given composition - the shadows would change so quickly that the initial impression would be lost if one dabbled about too much.  And unless you quickly move from one image to the next, you only wind up with a couple of images before you lose the light.  So while my “And now for something completely different . . .” image was made 10 minutes before Ann’s image, I wound up working furiously making 4 fundamentally different images in about a 5 minute span, changing from vertical to horizontal and from longer to normal focal length lenses.  

I had to work a bit for the last image before I decided to head back to my bag.  Initially, I made an image that included more of the bright area at the very bottom left, that didn’t feel right in the field.  So I raised my camera just a bit more for the image below.

While it has some beautiful lines, I think that bright spot on the bottom left is troubling.  So I’ve decided to try some crops with this image, and came up first, with the one below.  Keeping the same aspect ratio as it was shot at (2:3), I’ve moved the bottom and left edges until it eliminates that lit triangle in the bottom.

It still leaves an odd, but somewhat interesting overlapping of dune structures in the foreground which I’m not sure about.  What I am happy about is that it does not eliminate totally the grasses, textures and dune shapes in the middle of the image near the left edge.  

With that lower left corner still bugging me, I decided that I should go back to the full width and see about being more aggressive about the crop and ignoring the aspect ratio I originally photographed it in.  This is what I came up with.  And I’m much more satisfied with this image.

I think that the lower shadow play no longer detracts from this main dune feature, which has enough going on between the shadow-play to the right and the grasses and textures to the left, with the elegant curved line connecting the two, to keep one’s attention.  

In the four minutes it too me to pack up and walk back over to my backpack, and then to start visually scanning for new images, red started creeping into the setting sunlight, adding a reddish hue to the dunes before me.  

This is one of the images that I know I saw (and photographed) as a square, because just off to the right and left of the frame are hills that give the full-frame a rather unbalanced and disorganized appearance.  Yet once I apply the square format ratio to the image - you get the image below.

And since I worked with cropping the first image, and Ann and I took a workshop to help us start thinking more about our image making, I decided to critically think about the above image to see if there was some way to improve it.

The only thing that really struck me was that the dune formation on the right part of the horizon  adds complexity to a largely simple composition.  So I decided to see what would happen if I cropped the image somewhat, keeping the same square aspect ratio, which meant sacrificing some of the sky as well.  

This is the result. 

Does it help?  I’m not so sure.  It seems like the sloping dunes on the right want to continue a bit more in order to be visually settled, which they do in the first, un-cropped version.  I guess I’ll have to think about this one some more.

Anyway, those are the two images immediately preceding and following Ann’s shooting the shooter image.  Strangely enough, we didn’t have much more time left before we lost the shadows.  I thought we had more time, but it was surprising how quickly the sun became blocked out by the mountains to the west.  One moment we had these stunning shadow formations in the dunes and the next moment they were gone.  

Which was just as well.  As I mentioned above, we had quite the track back to Beast, though we did get to pause and photograph a bit when the sunset finally decided to play with the clouds in the sky.   Well, why don’t I just show you why it was worth while to stop and pull out the cameras one last time for the day . . . 

I can’t tell you how fortunate Ann and I feel to have been at the places we’ve been at the times we’ve been there. It makes all the effort to get out there seem like nothing more than the cost of entry. Really, quite the bargain if you think about it.

And for those of you reading this on April 25, the day of posting, have a happy Portugal Freedom Day! This is the date, much like July 4th for the US, when the dictatorship was overthrown in the Carnation Revolution and democracy was brought to Portugal. Yes, despite the pouring rain last night, there was fireworks!