December 22, 2017. Sonoma County Coast, California. On our way to The Sea Ranch for Christmas. The Pacific was living up to its name. Pacific. Peaceful. Mirror flat. The sky was calm. The temperature was mild. All was right with the world. Waiting until the clouds lazily drifted into position, I clicked. I wanted the dreamy look that Nature suggested. I just helped her along a bit. Then in creative rapture I hit a wrong […]
May 8, 2015. Sutro Baths, San Francisco, California. My general plan in shooting Horizons is to have water and sky and nothing more. In this scene I wanted the texture and pattern of light on the water juxtaposed with the soft clouds. Period. But without a crane I wasn’t going to get high enough to get the rock out of the frame and the light was changing rapidly and then this huge RORO (Roll On […]
January 24, 2016. Nepenthe, Big Sur Coast, California. We were celebrating my birthday with a day trip to Big Sur, and what trip to Big Sur is complete without an Ambrosia Burger at Nepenthe? Satiated, I turned to see what my prospects were for a sunset shot. Laminated clouds? Check. Sea calm? Check. No fog bank? Check. Free of shipping traffic? No. There was a ship on the horizon, heading south at a good clip. […]
April 4, 2014. Marin County Headlands. My seascape horizon photographs are devoid of any vestige of land, for the most part; and they show no man-made objects at all. So this image will never be part of my Horizons collections. But this scene intrigued me in 2014 and it still intrigues me today. The first draw was and is the subtlety of color on the water. And the sky. But then there’s the ship. Container […]
All you can hear is the breeze, the waves, the birds. Silence promotes calm. Calm brings about refection and realization. Recognized many times before but confirmed through repetition: Although there are those who try to create chaos in the world, it’s up to me to decide whether I want to respond in kind or to disagree with an automatic knee jerk and maintain my own conviction that the basic good in the majority of people […]
Yes, it is. As a matter of fact, it’s a view from about five hundred feet above sea level off the side of southbound California Highway 1 in Sonoma County. Originally shot in December 2013, this image sat in my archives for years. It didn’t sit there because I particularly wanted it to. It sat there because there’s evidence of a nasty lens aberration in the RAW file that several previous attempts at RAW processing […]
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
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 […]
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.)
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 […]
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 […]
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