Dinner View
The view from the dinner table inside the Greer Cabin, a minors home that's been restored up in the Ivanpah Mountains of the Mojave National Preserve.
This was a challenging "assignment" for me and was not quite the landscape I was expecting to shoot on the first day of my NPPE MasterClass. It forced me to slow down and look at things in a different light than I'm used to. Angles, perspectives, colors, contrasts, and most importantly what was I sharing with my viewer? It took me the better part of an hour to settle in and capture this one. Considering the remote location and the nature of this small cabin my mind went back to my own families history, and what their homesteading experience must have been like on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska and the great plains of Nebraska before that.
Thinking that dinner time was probably an important time for them every day, I decided to capture the meal place. More than simply photographing the center piece on the table though, I chose to broaden the subject to be the experience of sitting at this humble table for a meal. To make this happen I sat down at the table as if I were going to eat a meal myself, and what I saw was a beautiful of a Joshua Tree out the window. Immediately I knew this was what I wanted to share my viewer.
I moved the chair out of the way and set my tripod in its place so that camera sat right where my head had been a moment ago. To create the image I had to use a technique taught earlier in the morning by our instructor, where multiple shots with different focus depths were taken and would be blended together during our editing session later in the day. I also had to shoot several different exposures to be able to capture the light inside the cabin as well as the tree and sky outside the window. With the combination of focus stacking along with essentially creating my own HDR by blending in different exposures this was probably my single most difficult shot of the week.
