Working the Image - Canyon Lands, From Earlier that Morning
It didn’t take me very long after I’d started working at our Canyonlands Needles District sunrise location before I decided that I’d come across an image that warranted my attention and time. In fact, it was the sixth image of the morning, though to be honest, the first three were really just warm-up shots. Sometimes I pull out the camera just to get things flowing - make a couple of shots to get that hesitation out of the way, and then slow down and start thinking through the images.
We’d arrived with enough time for me to do that, and to even move to a distinctly different location and looking in a very different direction. As I was looking for my second image in that direction that I saw a potential foreground subject. As I walked over, the opportunity it seemed to afford increased greatly, particularly with my focus on trying to make more landscape type images.
After a few minutes of trying to find the best position, I set up my tripod and made an initial image.
Charlie Waite would have been proud of me. There wasn’t anything I could do about the taller bushy trees, but the branch of the dead tree reaching up to and just crossing the horizon felt like a needle to the eye. It needed to be dealt with.
I spent the next several minutes arranging and rearranging my camera position on the slope of an adjacent rock. Face it, the easiest location to place your tripod is often not the correct spot for a good image. Not that trying to balance on a sloped rock guarantees a better image, but as Ansel said, “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” The camera needs to be where it needs to be, regardless of how easy or difficult it is to achieve that.
I finally felt I had the right location (honestly, I now think I should have moved a few more inches higher to get the dead tree branch beneath the background curve of the rock) and made a couple of exposures.
While they looked good (read: I missed the merger of the upper tree branch), there was something about the image that seemed lacking. Not in the composition or mixture of elements, but a bit of life. That, I decided, would come when the sun rose, or at least topped the clouds that lay on the horizon.
Weighing the plusses and minuses of moving on to other images or leaving the camera in position and waiting for the sun to rise (I admit, I’m rarely one to stay in one position too long to wait for conditions to change - I’m with Edward Weston on this one - in the hour that you wait I could have found a dozen or more other interesting images), I decided that I felt strongly about this one. Once I remembered I had my point-and-shoot with me, and that it too makes decent images, the decision became an easy one. I left my camera on the tripod to make those other images while the sun worked its way towards the horizon.
Twelve minutes and 4 point-and-shoot images later, the sun topped the horizon and the landscape lit up. Just as I’d hoped.
As much as I love the desert pre-dawn light, this time I think the direct sunlight added some life to the image that wasn’t present earlier. I’m glad I waited.
In case you were wondering, my quick foray with the point-and-shoot did not go to waste. Immediately after making this image, I went over to the location of one of those point-and-shoot images to make another image with my Fuji (for lack of a better word, a “better” camera). After that, well, you saw those images in the last blog post.