This is a story about not following the crowd when your inner muse leads you elsewhere.
A few years ago, I attended a photo workshop where we spent a couple of days in Lone Pine, California. Lone Pine is near the Alabama Hills, a unique landscape of large boulders and unusual rock formations. Just west of the Alabama Hills, one can see Mt. Whitney and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This dramatic scenery has been used as the backdrop for scores of movies, especially westerns.
One of the best times to photograph the landscape of the Alabama Hills is just at sunrise, when the sun’s rays cast long shadows and make the rock formations stand out. So, one morning we set out for the Alabama Hills, arriving before sunrise. We had a few minutes to find a location we liked and to set up our cameras and tripods before the sun rose above the horizon. Once the sun came up, we photographed for maybe an hour or so. After that, the good lighting was gone.
I couldn’t find any interesting rock formations, or at least any rock formations that I felt like photographing. I made a few exposures of some rocks that were okay but that didn’t really excite me.
There were plenty of shaded areas on the ground where large boulders blocked the sun. In one of these, I was attracted to some bushes, either dead or struggling to survive in this arid place. I spent some time photographing these bushes. This is one of the photographs I made. I find it beautiful in some strange way. It speaks to me of life, and death, in a hostile environment.