Beat the Heat

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"My impression is that the critique of, or at least the rethinking of, the whole business of the sublime and the beautiful in American landscape photographs began around the time of Robert Adams's The New West in 1974.... All of that work was read as a reaction against the work of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, against what might be called the Sierra Club photographers."

 -- Robert Hass, in What Light Can Do

On the recommendation of a friend, I went to the library to pick up Robert Hass's award-winning book, What Light Can Do -- Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World. (He recommended purchasing it so you can make notes in the margins and keep returning to it.) Much of it is too cerebral for me, but I'm still finding plenty worth perusing. The section on photographers includes an essay on Robert Adams, whose vision of nature never appealed to me before I saw the sample photos in this book and read what Hass has to say about them.

As I started shooting this morning, first pulling over to photograph the rising sun through the chaotic tangle of forest, and then stopping to pay attention to a lone, desiccated thistle, I imagined I was channeling a photographer with a very different aesthetic than my own. It was an interesting -- I hate to call it an exercise because it felt more natural than that -- but an interesting point of view to adopt. If we can observe our own egos, we have a chance to alter our habitual ways of seeing. We can loosen the reins and see the world anew.

I was surprised to find when I got home and processed my images that I actually liked the weird sunrise-through-the-forest, and even the lone thistle. But just west of the thistle, just a head-turn away, a scene was unfolding that pulled me right back into my usual pattern of seeing, which I also welcomed.

I've tried to break out of visual ruts before by doing photography in places like downtown San Francisco, or perusing the work of other photographers.

I knew I was on a roll with the whole business of rut-scuttling when I deigned to photograph the nasty invasive flower called yellow star thistle (Centaurea solstitialis). "Better kicked than picked" is a term of endearment for certain inedible mushrooms, and I've always felt that way about star thistle: better pulled up by its roots than photographed. But at least the light was nice.

My plan for the day had been to park at Rock Spring and hike down to Laurel Dell to try to photograph migrating songbirds that might pass through that area since there's at least a little water and shade there. But after I'd hustled through the star thistle patch I realized the light was still pretty good on the larger landscape and explored the possibilities. It's been several weeks, maybe a couple of months or more, since I've had such a fog-free view back toward San Francisco.

This grandfather oak tree provided excellent shade and was turning out some very fat, green acorns.

This is the same tree, on the other side of the trunk.

Scruffy September stuff, with one of the big oaks in the background.

I'd been hoping to see the year's new flock of California quails and was treated to a covey foraging by the side of the road.

They were skittish, though, and took to the trees when I tried to approach.

Running this way.

And that way.

Looks so nice I have to shoot it twice.

My socks collected an incredible number of grass seeds while I followed these turkeys around.

I felt like I was having a pretty good day of photography despite the tyranny of expectations I'd imposed on myself before I left home. Here's how the tyranny of expectations works. It's a little after 5 a.m., and you're lying in bed trying to decide where you want to go to do some photography, and whether there actually is anyplace good since you've "seen it all before" and, by the way, it's going to be a scorcher of a day with temps in the 90s. 

That whole Zen thing about "beginner's mind" -- isn't that just a nice slogan, a clever quotation?

I don't know, but going up this morning without expectations worked so well that I'm afraid I'll jinx it just by talking about it. 

The thing is, I spend pretty much the whole workweek in downtown San Francisco on the fourth floor of a sealed, climate-controlled tower of steel and glass. Even if I didn't take my camera out of the bag, I'm still going to have a good day if I can get up to Mt. Tam on the weekend.

So I was poking around the internet the other day and found another Mt. Tam blog (see "Mt. Tam Links" on the sidebar). Like this one is going to be, it was a one-year project. I enjoyed scrolling through the pages, reading and taking note of various mountain-viewing vantage points.

By this time in my wanderings I'd circled back around to Cataract Creek (where the water striders are getting really nervous in their few remaining puddles) and put my ear to the woods. Chickadees, check. Juncos, check. Acorn woodpeckers, check. Not too much action on the migrant front, though. It was only about 9 a.m. -- I'd only been up there about two hours -- but it was already getting hot, and my t-shirt was soaked. I figured I might as well save Laurel Dell for another day.

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Looking Back

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The south side of the mountain has its charms and adventures, but when you go over the hill you find the north side holds plenty of promise as well.

I took on this project -- photographing Mt. Tam for a year -- without giving it much thought. It seemed like a fun thing to do at the time. I've been wandering around out there for twenty years, and I'd like to leave an homage to the mountain on the internet -- a medium that still seemed new and possibly useless back in the early '90s.

The project is turning out to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. I don't want to shoot the same subjects I've shot before, but after twenty years I find it hard to believe I'll find any truly new subjects. I don't want to make photographs for the project that I've already made in the past, and when I see poison oak, for example, I think, "Oh, I've already photographed poison oak." 

I stopped at this location, by the way, to visit my nemesis grove -- trees that I assume to be non-native since I can't identify what species they are. I've never seen the flowers or the fruit. They are winter-deciduous and have interesting lichens growing on them that I've seen nowhere else. I brought home a leaf to help me find it in Marin Flora, but that wasn't enough. Still a mystery. [Update: My wife found a good candidate by thumbing through our Sierra Trees to find similar leaves, and I'm now pretty convinced the trees are Oregon ash (Fraxinus latifolia). They don't produce flowers until they're 30 years old, and even then not every year. They're in the southern limit of their coastal range at this location, but they can be found farther south in the Sierra Nevada.]

So I try to think about how to show what I already know, subjects such as wild honeysuckle berries that I've already photographed -- the low-hanging fruit -- in a new way. I try to get past the idea of simply trying to show a more-or-less literal translation of what a subject looks like and try to see the same subjects in a different light.

To see things differently, I find I'm often drawn to close-ups, which actually feels like coming full circle. When I took up nature photography in the early '80s, the subjects that drew me in were the wildflowers and waterfalls of the Santa Ynez Mountains overlooking Santa Barbara. They held a new kind of beauty and mystery to me. Or at least, I was experiencing the beauty and mystery of nature for the first time as an adult, and for the first time as a photographer with a little bit of education and training.

My First Cover, 1984

But the mountain always seems ready to spring something at least somewhat new. Sure, I've seen and photographed chorus frogs many times -- but not once before have I caught one sitting on a lily pad. It's hard to appreciate how small these guys are. The first one I saw this morning was entirely brown, clinging to one of the topmost leaves of a smartweed plant, and I mistook it for a small moth . . . until it hopped into some nearby horsetail plants.

The Lily Pond itself has changed quite a bit over the years. For a while there, the place was overrun with non-native bullfrogs, which eat native chorus frogs for breakfast. But a three-year drought killed off the interlopers, leaving the chorus frogs as kings of the lilies. Now, even the non-native lilies are losing ground to some kind of sedge that seems intent on taking over.

A few of the waterlilies were high and dry. Here, a new leaf forms at the base of a plant that's several feet away from the surface of the pond, along whose edge a pair of American robins darted their beaks at insects and other morsels too small for me to see.

I should remember this plant as "marsh buckwheat," though its common name is smartweed. It's in the buckwheat family, Polygonaceae, and is called Persicaria punctata. It, too, often grows in the water, but today I found this patch in a dry, shallow depression near Lily Pond (or Lily Lake, depending on your map) that was still a small pond when I last stopped by. It's tempting to relate every dry spell, every drought, forest fire or other calamity to "global warming" -- a term I was blissfully unaware of in the 1980s (when we were still worried about ozone holes, a problem we actually addressed and solved). But if nothing else, the changes that seem to be happening make a photography project like this seem at least a little more worthwhile. Will there still be a Lily Pond in 20 years?

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August Favorites

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I used to run out on short excursions to Mt. Tamalpais, and I always brought back a lot of flowers--as many as I could carry--and it was most touching to see the quick natural enthusiasm in the hearts of the ragged, neglected, defrauded, dirty little wretches of the Tar Flat waterfront of the city I used to pass through on my way home.... It was a hopeful sign, and made me say: "No matter into what depths of degradation humanity may sink, I will never despair while the lowest love the pure and the beautiful and know it when they see it."

--John Muir, quoted in Tamalpais Walking 

by Tom Killion and Gary Snyder

Coulter Pine Toes

Buck at Meadow's Edge

Jack-in-the-Grass

Paper Wasps

Forest Litter

Flame Skimmer

Bolinas Ridge #1

Bolinas Ridge #2

Potrero Meadow

Pennyroyal

Ladybug & Milkweed

Milkweed & Mylitta Crescent

Datura Fruit

Redwoods on Helen Markt Trail

Mud Dauber

Quail Run

Fir in the Fog

Cat Stretch

Fog Drip Puddles

Helleborine Orchid

Coyote on Edge of World

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Bolinas Ridge #3