As you’ve already seen, Ann made some interesting images of me while on our Death Valley trip.  And while the previous shooting the shooter showed off Ann’s composition skills for leading the eye, this one takes a very different approach and takes advantage of photography’s technical potential.

This has been a long time coming, but Ann and I thought it best that we make the announcement to everyone at the same time.  Ann and I are breaking up . . . with Lightroom.  Lightroom has served us well these past few years, but as I’ll explain below, it was time to call it off and move onward with our lives.  It wasn’t an easy decision to make, nor has it come without costs, but we’re convinced it was the right one.  We remain friends with Lightroom, but as we move forward in our photographic journey, our organization and image developing tool will be Phase One’s Capture One.  

One of the things that many landscape photographers will tell you they dread the most is clear blue skies.  As much as they offer incredible pre-dawn light in certain places (such as the coast, or the desert), clear blue skies are, in a word, boring.  Which means the skies are often pretty much framed outside of the picture when they’re totally blue.  Landscape photographers will opt, hands-down, for partly cloudy skies.  Many such as myself will even prefer the soft light of overcast skies.  And certainly that is why, in part, we go out in adverse weather conditions.  It’s not that we like being wet, or cold, or both, it’s that weather gives us amazing conditions of light and clouds.  That’s one reason why Ansel Adams’ Clearing Winter Storm is so amazing.  Well, the one thing we really didn’t have during our December adventure was plain old blue skies.  That meant that the skies above presented some rather incredible photographic opportunities! 

Ann and I spent a couple of hours at the Ibex Dunes.  As I said in my post of the trip, I had a blast.  Ann had less of one given that it was harder for her to avoid the footprints that tracked throughout the dunes than it was for me because of her wider, landscape approach to image making.  So she continued to photograph anyway and wound up doing what she often does, which is to start including me in her landscape photographs.  Which always leads to the inevitable shooting the shooter question - what in the world was Dan making a photograph of?

Ann and I spent part of New Year’s day printing photographs.  We printed some images for friends, and also were testing a new program we’ve acquired to work on our images.  Most importantly, we took the time to work on a couple of images from our recent trip to Death Valley, which leads us to this installment of Printing the Image.  

The next morning found us up and early driving down 20 Mule Team Canyon Road by moonlight.  Given that it was a full moon and the moon was out (unlike when we were driving around in the Alabama Hills), we could actually see where we were going and, more importantly, whether we wanted to make any stops before we hit our GPS pinned photo locations.  It was like driving through an alien landscape, simply incredible!