Being There

Many years ago, I decided to nurture my basic interest in photography with a concerted effort to improve. After decades of reading and field seminars, my pictures have gotten better. Yet while I truly enjoy photography, in the end, it is one among a handful of avocations that I pursue only now and then…when I feel like it.

However hard a person works to become a better photographer, I still contend that the number one requirement for taking good photographs is simply being there (with a camera, of course). Often, when someone compliments me on a scenic photo, I respond with the comment, “In that spot, a chimpanzee could have taken a lovely picture.” And it’s true.

Never has that fact been more fully and unbelievably verified than in this photograph.

Our solar eclipse sojourn last August included a visit to Steens Mountain, a curious and isolated 9,738-foot peak in southeast Oregon’s high desert country. We were perhaps a third of the way along the 52-mile dirt road that traverses the mountain when we stopped at an overlook. Kiger Gorge is one of several classic U-shaped glacial valleys that descends the slopes of Steens Mountain. Even a view hampered by smoke from summer wildfires couldn’t diminish the immensity of the setting. The earth fell instantly and steeply away. The lip of the cirque was a crisp edge to a very deep and very broad valley cut by the long gone river of ice.
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As I scampered along the edge of the gorge with my camera, I looked to my left. “What the heck…?” A blond woman wearing a loose-fitting, full length, shiny bright fuchsia windswept taffeta dress stood on the edge of the cirque gazing down the valley. Well, of course. Happens all the time.

The amazing opportunity that such a juxtaposition presented trumped my usual shyness in such situations. Over I went. And while I did talk to her and her partner about taking her picture there, I took this one before I spoke to them. It is candid and not posed.

A short while later on the Steens Mountain road, we stopped to help the couple who were standing beside their disabled vehicle (a fancy high-clearance custom vehicle that looked like a cross between a Hummer and an RV). A transmission fluid leak couldn’t be stopped. Only our cell phone had service in this empty landscape. They called a tow truck in Burns, two and a half hours away. It was the young woman’s 40th birthday.

It was an adventurous day with a valuable photography lesson: When in the middle of nowhere, find a lovely woman wearing a full length fuchsia dress.

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