The other night Ann and I were (I thought) unwinding on the couch after a long day’s work.  I think we were watching the Daily Show, or Grand Tour - something fairly light and entertaining.  What was on TV had my attention, and Ann was sitting there with her feet up on the couch, playing with her iPad and periodically laughing at what was on the screen.  At the end of the show, Ann hands me her iPad and says, “What do you think of that?”

We’ve had a crazy schedule these past few weeks with a lot on our plates, ending with a winter storm fouling up our plans to see Michael Kenna at the Portland Japanese Gardens last Saturday.  So what do you do when events try their best to stop your photography - you print!  So on Sunday we warmed up the Canon and made some prints!

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.

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. 

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?