Shooting the Shooter - Ibex Dunes 2

Well, I guess we’re at it again!  Another shooting the shooter image from the Ibex dunes taken from a bit earlier in the day (well, not that much earlier), right when Ann was getting ready to call it a day and I was just getting started with my last furious burst of images.  

Looking at Ann’s image below, it’s tough to see that it’s actually a shooting the shooter image.   I’m not quite sure that the image was made intentionally to photograph me or whether I just “popped” up, literally, in her image.  That’s me off to the right - a fairly tiny dark speck on the top of the dune largely hidden by the mountains behind me.  When you blow the image up you do see that my tripod is set up, so it’s not like I just suddenly appeared to ruin her photograph. But I’m afraid to ask whether she had this framed before I arrived and, if so, did she get the image she wanted before I added an unwanted human element to it.  Sometimes it’s best not to ask! 

Anyway, Ann’s image is related to one from the previous post. While she is in a very different location than where she was when she made the previous post’s image, I’m roughly in the location I was in when making the first image in the last post and the image from the one before (the “And now for something completely different . . .” image).  Looking at my images, after I’d dropped my bag and climbed up the sand, I took several images in this direction, then turned to my right to make several images (again, you can see that elegant shadow curve on the upper edge of the dune just to the left of the background hill), and then turned back in the direction I’m looking above (towards the camera) for the first of my images in the last post.

This image is quite a bit more graphic than Ann’s previous shooting the shooter image.  You have these bright-lit dune areas that are very abstract in their imagery, and within the shadows of the dunes some very interesting highlighted features that reflect the sky.  The mountains also seem much more distant in this image, and have much less prominence.  To me, the image is more about what is happening in the shadow areas within the dunes than about the landscape context of the dunes.

So what was I photographing?  Well, . . .

I’d apparently plopped on my telephoto zoom to extend way out towards the northern part of the Ibex Dunes to frame the huge dune we did not make it to that day (it had been a long day traveling, with an emergency side-trip to a city to get ad-blue for the engine, which of course required us to back-track quite a ways, but one doesn’t drive into backcountry with a warning light on).  This image was made at 156mm on the 55-200mm zoom lens, so don’t let it’s close-up appearance fool you.

As you can see, the sun is just starting to lower and to cast longer shadows across the dunes.  I remember being very excited at seeing these shadows.  And then the terror that struck once I noticed I could almost see the shadows moving and the realization that things were going to start happening real fast and would likely be over way before I’m ready for them to be.  

I like this image for many of the same reasons I liked Ann’s shooting the shooter image from the last time.  There’s the foreground showing the textures of the sand itself, then there’s the elegant lines and curves of the giant dunes and the shadows they cast, and then there’s the mountainous landscape that surrounds the area topped by cloudy skies.  

There’s something immensely elegant about the forms nature can produce.  

There was, of course, an image made after the photograph Ann made of me. For that image, I turned to look to my right.

This is the first of the images I made that led towards the “And now, for something completely different . . .” image.  That image was off to the upper left of this frame where the dune in shadow meets the dune in sunlight.  It took me a few images of experimenting with these textures in the sand and the elegant shadow lines to work my way to the left and to realize that image was there.

That’s part of the photographic process, exploring a landscape to discover what you were not yet aware of.  And then making an image of it.    I love that process almost as much as making the image itself.

And with the setting sun, the ripples in the sand became more pronounced (as did the shadows on the dunes), which seemed to bring the landscape to life. Or should I say a different life.

I sure hope we find some big dunes out here.  We hear there are some good ones in Spain . . . .