5 Paces
This trip back to the US was a strange one. For me, it’s been the most difficult return trip I’ve had since moving to Europe, mainly for social/cultural, societal and political reasons. Call it a bit of culture shock, but I’m not going to go into that. I guess village life suits me. But for the both of us, much hadn’t really gone according to plan. We started out arriving with colds from our flight, which meant we stayed several extra days and nights in a hotel (we planned to stay a couple of nights anyway just in case . . . what actually happened might happen) to make sure it wasn’t COVID or either of the flu variants (it wasn’t). And it was a cold that lingered on longer than either of us had previously experienced, leaving us out of sorts for three or so weeks. That threw our plans totally out of whack, so some of our side-trips got cancelled. I guess I can’t blame it all on the bug we got because it turns out we’re popular people and we received invites left and right. That part worked out fine, but it was all very strange how it played out. Flexibility helped as we turned into socialites, but it doesn’t overcome feeling worn out from a lingering bug.
What did work out (as much as one can expect) was our planned trip towards the end of our visit. We of course had prepared a photo trip along the way to Phoenix to visit dad and . . . it pretty much worked out. A long driving day to start out, with a break at a favorite breakfast diner near Klamath Falls, a short second drive down to Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills for an afternoon/morning, and then heading down to Joshua Tree through Death Valley (with a very quick but productive shoot), with another productive afternoon-evening/early morning in Joshua Tree for some real photography. This post is from the Alabama Hills portion of the mini-trip.
I’d scouted out the Alabama Hills before our trip and realized that during our previous visits, I’d totally missed a key portion of the area. It was a road that follows Tuttle Creek through some really great rock formations, named, unsurprisingly, Tuttle Creek Road. We stopped at a pull-out at the bottom of a stretch to make an image I’d immediately seen (a sunlit tree with a rock wall backdrop in shadow), and then started working our way back up-creek photographing on a cool, sunny day.
After enjoying ourselves for quite some time, Ann leap-frogged me by quite a bit up the road and I hear one of my favorite of Ann’s statements, “Hey, Dan, I think you want to check this out.” This time she added, “I think you’d like these textures.” As usual, she was right.
Before entering the area Ann had flagged for me, I opted to make more of a landscape image of the rock formation. Although it was sunny, I managed to control the harshness of the sun and both give some texture to the smooth portions of the rocks and a sense of depth to the crevice to the right.
But as I moved in for a close inspection, hoping for more abstract compositions, the light was just too harsh to convey the subtlety of the colors in the rock that were barely visible under sunlight. So I opted not to take any detail photographs. Later, after we’d had an early dinner, I showed Ann the above image and I responded to her inquiry whether I’d taken any close-up images that I thought detail photographs would have been better in indirect light. Ann naturally responded, “Well, why don’t you go back there now? The sun’s just about to set.” As before, Ann was right.
And I was too. Although the light was quickly fading, there was a richness to the colors in the rock that wasn’t there earlier in the day. I returned to the same spot and made each of the images below within the grassy central area in the photograph above.
The first image was of the larger, flat rock surface to the center left. It had so much going on, that it made for an obvious starting place.
And then I stepped in closer to begin framing details that appear more composed in the forms and colors they present.
Slowly, carefully studying the rock faces until something catches my eye. And once that happens, you frame around it, moving in and out, until you can find something that just looks, or feels, right.
If not, you move on.
Sometimes it’s like staring at clouds, trying to “see” something in the cloud - an elephant here, a face there. Other times, it’s purely abstract. In whatever case though, there’s something inside that says, “Make this image.” There isn’t always a “why” at the time the shutter button is pressed.
And so it went like that for quite some time as the sun set behind the Sierra Mountains and the light started bouncing off the few clouds above and off the rocks around.
It was meditative. There, alone with my camera, with only the sounds of the near-by creek and the occasional bird.
Me, just taking my time, looking, seeing, making photographs. No rush other than the knowledge that the world keeps spinning and this moment won’t last forever. And the physical reminder as the shutter times slowly and steadily increase . . . 1 second . . . 2 seconds . . . 3 seconds.
By the time I made the last image it was a 6 second exposure. And I was working harder and harder to find interesting compositions. The thing about sticking around a place for awhile while photographing is that it gets harder and harder to make a good image. You’ve already made the easy, obvious ones; now you have to really work to see, and then make new images. Often they’re very different than the ones you saw earlier, and occasionally they’re the best image of the shoot. Sometimes after you’ve exhausted what images were there on easy offer, you don’t discover anything new or different. They’re either not there or, the more likely, you just missed them. Other times, the rewards of working, waiting, pushing it are worth the effort.
You can see the rock face of my final image towards the left edge of the broader, landscape image of the location. At first the photograph was intended to be about the raised panels of stone and the cracks formed between and within them. To the initial casual glance, it was a uniformly dark area rock and I was just hoping for some slight shadowing to give the image a sense of depth. But as I composed the image and my eyes adjusted to the scene, I realized that the warm reflected light off the surrounding rocks and cool indirect light from the sky overhead combined to reveal a wealth of subtle color and contrasts within the darkness to add to the shapes that had originally caught my eye.
It is perhaps the best of the bunch. If not, it’s definitely the most subtle.
That was it for the session. Eight photographs made in half an hour, all made from rock surfaces surrounding a patch of weeds that took no more than 5 paces to cover all the shooting locations. To the naked eye, night was falling as I packed my camera bag. By the time I got back to the hotel a few minutes later, it was dark.
As I opened the hotel door Ann said, “That took you awhile. I guess you found some good photographs?” Indeed I had, or at least I enjoyed making them.