It’s True Confession time. On Monday, April 1, I put up the original post of this shot, with the rather cryptic commentary: California Highway 1 is one of the most beautiful — and thrilling — roads in the world. I also said that there was no editing in Photoshop. I received a fair number of comments complimenting me on the shot and agreeing that it is a spectacular road. I should have felt great. I […]
(The essence of a tulip might be a onelip. Nikon D750; Nikon 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR Zoom. RAW processing in DxO Pro; final editing in Adobe Photoshop.) More fine-art photography: www.amagaphoto.com
I started this blog only a short while ago — November 2018 — in answer to requests from friends to put my “other” photography on the Web. “Other” photography would be defined as images that go beyond the self-imposed limits of what I put on my formal website. I also intended this blog to be a way of making all my photography more widely known. That was my original purpose and that remains my purpose. […]
Yesterday, forty-nine fellow inhabitants of our world were murdered while they were worshiping in Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The madness of this act is unfathomable. The fact that it happened in New Zealand is deeply saddening. New Zealand ranks number two in the Global Peace Index. At times like this our hearts can get very dark and the darkness can be infectious. While we mourn the loss, we must not succumb to a hopeless […]
Enveloped in fog. (Nikon D500; Nikon 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR zoom. RAW processing in DxO PhotoLab 2.2; final editing in Adobe Photoshop.)
(Nikon D500, Nikon 200-500mm f/5.6 ED VR zoom. RAW processing in DxO PhotoLab, final editing in Adobe Photoshop.) More fine-art photography: www.amagaphoto.com
February 2019. My back yard and my computer. Every year there are plum blossoms in my yard. Every year — in homage to Japanese art — I photograph them, searching for The One. Over the past few weeks, many gigabytes died on this search. This blossom? That one? One blossom? Many? High-key? Low-key? Simple background? Mottled background? High contrast? Low contrast? Saturated? Muted? On and on and on and on. . . Images fell like […]
July 7, 2002. Bay of Fundy. My love of symmetry around a horizontal line goes way back. In fact, it goes much earlier than this. But this is my first satisfactory rendition using a digital camera. The camera was a Canon G2. Its resolution was a whopping four megapixels and the 34-102mm lens was not wide enough to capture the whole view — this is two shots stitched together in Photoshop 7.0 on a Mac PowerBook […]
I’ve been thinking about cold recently. As with all things, cold is relative. The landscape above shows Fox Glacier on the South Island of New Zealand. That’s cold. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the mid-40s in the daytime is cold for most of us. But I do know cold: I grew up in western New York State, where cold is cold. Sub-zero cold. Quiet cold. What got me thinking about cold was some […]
December 7 and 8, 2018, Point Reyes National Seashore. Horizons are beautiful in their simplicity. Engaging in their subtle complexity. Their moods are varied. They have endless color and texture possibilities. For all these reasons I never tire of them. But there’s another reason as well. Horizons are calming. Soothing. Stabilizing. Horizons are therapeutic. Stand on a bluff looking outward over the sea for only a few minutes, and if you’re like most people you’ll […]
June 14, 2011, the Tate Britain, London. If I had to pick one favorite artist, it would be J.M.W. Turner. I think of his work as the bridge between Romanticism and Impressionism and in my opinion he often outdid both. I find his later work, especially, to be transcendent. In June 2011, my wife, nephew, and I went to Europe to visit family, surf (one of us), hike, and absorb culture. The first stop was […]
April 10, 2015, Hurricane Point, Big Sur Coast. My dog and I decided that conditions were right for a ride down the coast. Travels with Chewy. And Nikon. We made it as far south as Hurricane Point. Crystal clear. The horizon went halfway to Hawaii. And so did the sunbeam. Chewy and I looked out to sea. He turned and looked to me as if to say, “this is special.” A sea dog. A wise […]
This is one of my favorite seascape horizon photographs: How Blue Can You Get? Some photos present themselves to me on a platter. Some are made. This is both—although in this case the platter was more of a blue plate special. February 7, 2013, Sonoma County Coast. I was driving up the coast with my wife, looking forward to a winter weekend on the bluffs. The driver in me was trying to beat an impending […]
December 24, 2018, Sonoma County Coast. I took a walk on the bluffs on Christmas Eve. A little while before sunset, sunbeams drew a broad “A” behind a rapidly moving, billowing cloud bank. It looked promising. “Don’t quite like how it looks? Think it could improve?” I asked myself rhetorically. “Wait five seconds.” I did—and it just kept getting better. Over the next few minutes, many exposures were made. One was chosen. On this Christmas […]
Abstract comes from Latin abstrahere “to pull away, detach.” Abstraction pulls away and detaches from the representational and moves into the conceptual. These were taken at Point Reyes near Chimney Rock. The views are 180° apart, taken within minutes of each other. One looks back toward Drake’s Bay and the hills of the Point Reyes peninsula. The other looks out to sea. (Nikon D850, Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 G2.) More fine art photography at www.amagaphoto.com
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