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 […]
(Canon G7X II. RAW processing in DxO PhotoLab 2; final editing in Adobe Photoshop.) More fine-art photography: www.amagaphoto.com
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 […]
February 17, 2019, San Joaquin River Delta; February 10, 2019, San Francisco Bay. I’m lucky to live in an area where White-tailed Kites are relatively common. Yesterday we went on a birding trip through the San Joaquin River Delta with naturalist David Wimpfheimer on a boat operated by Dolphin Charters. I recommend both. Along the way we saw about sixty species. One standout was this beautiful and cooperative white-tailed kite. He watched us as we slowed […]
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 […]
Scrape: To graze across or on something. The sunbeam scraped the sea. Scrape: A difference of opinion or predicament. Is this image literal? Abstract? Impressionistic? (Nikon D850; Nikon 200-500mm f/5.6 ED VR zoom.)
Gulls are everywhere. Gulls are a dime a dozen. They’re not special. They’re not particularly beautiful. They’re not evocative. Gulls are a waste of time. I don’t shoot gulls. Yeah. Right. The only statement above that’s even partially true is the first one: they do seem to be almost everywhere. Meet Spot. Spot is a Western Gull of a certain age who hangs out in the vicinity of Tomalas Bay in California. Spot was given […]
January 17, 2019, Point Reyes National Seashore. There he was. Coyote. There I was. Human. As we warily watched each other it occurred to me that each of us thinks the other is wild, unpredictable, and dangerous. We stared. I got my shots. He walked off—impatient to get on with life, but unscathed. I thought he was handsome. I don’t know what he thought. (Nikon D500, Tamron 100-400 f/4.5-6.3 Di VC USD)
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 […]
I spent some time on the Holidays going over work from years gone by. I find that when I do this, I come across treasures that were overlooked the first time around. The first two were taken in 2014 on the Sonoma County coast north of Jenner and the third was taken in July 2018 on the San Mateo County coast near Pescadero. I wasn’t particularly in search of any of these scenes on the […]
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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