Puzzle Pieces
When I was teaching an introductory photography course at Virginia Tech back in the 1980’s, there was an exercise I’d give my students. I would give each of them a large Xerox copy of a photograph and have them try to find as many other possible photographs within that photograph as they could. And then have them think about how those other images are different than the one the photographer made. It was an interesting exercise to get folks to think about the importance of framing (and the focal lengths needed for that framing from the same position) and how the isolation of a subject, or the tying together of subjects, can change how a viewer perceives the image. For me, our second stop at Death Valley pretty much turned into that.
Instead of heading straight down from Lone Pine to Joshua Tree, we decided to take a detour through Death Valley. It took a bit longer than we expected, even though we made only two short stops, but it was worth it. We made a few images at our stops and we still got our late afternoon/evening shooting session in Joshua Tree National Park (but it made for one hell of a long day given we started with a pre-dawn shoot at the Alabama Hills).
Our goal was to drive the Artists Palette loupe in Death Valley along our way. There, we made two stops, one of them yielded the images below. At the Artists Palette, the ores visible in the ground render the landscape like . . . an Artist’s Palette. Perhaps it was the detail shots I’d made in Lone Pine the previous evening, but I was in a similar, detail fame of mind. Except this time, I had to use the longest lenses I could to isolate the interesting landscape colors.
Then it was simply a matter of focusing in on the colored forms and finding a composition that I felt was “right.”
Given the distance between us and the landscape from the viewpoint, and the fact we were heading towards Joshua Tree, we didn’t have time to hike into the area - though one of my exposures of the image below (not shown here) shows a (very small) hiker. I guess we have to save that for the next visit.
We didn’t spend long there, perhaps half an hour, but it made for some interesting images. In case you were wondering, below is a panorama of that landscape. You can see most parts of the above images within this frame.
I wish we’d had more time to explore, but we were on a dash to Phoenix and had no time to waste because we were supposed to spend the night (with evening/morning photo sessions) in Joshua Tree, so we had to keep moving. Still, not bad for a quick stop, shoot it on the fly photo session!