In The Green

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We drove up for a quick nature fix this morning. Pam wanted to do some watercolor painting down by Laurel Dell, but we first wanted to have a look at Cataract Falls. The water is finally flowing more like it ought to in winter. While Pam looked for a good spot to settle down and paint, I poked around the general area to see what I might find. It was nice to just be out in nature and immersed in the green.

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Northside Closure

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Fairfax-Bolinas Road is still closed at Azalea Hill, where I made the image above on a similarly wet February day back in 2010. Carson Falls is another good destination from Azalea Hill.

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Art of Conservation

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I shot this picture in July 1994 during a backpacking trip in the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness. My friend is holding a book called "Deep Ecology" while sitting on the edge of a fire ring in a horse-packer's camp that is overflowing with discarded metal grills and other detritus. We found some of the grills in the fire pit, but many of them had been tossed into the surrounding bushes. It amazed us that people who use horses to pack all their stuff into the wilderness can't be bothered to pack it back out. Shameful behavior from entitled, spoiled people.

I wouldn't load heavy camera gear in my backpack to hike into wilderness areas and photograph the ugliness left by hunters, horse-packers, cattle-ranchers and cows, and until I encountered the idea of "eco-porn" I never did. Eco-porn is basically a derisive term used for nature photography that people like to look at. It's the images that sustain the illusion that all is well "out there" somewhere beyond the teeming hives of civilization. But of course it's not just pristine nature out there. All the natural resources required to sustain civilization are extracted from out there. All the crap we throw away gets tossed out there. 

One day we're going to use it all up, which is why we're so interested in mining other planets, moons, asteroids. We know we're going to use up this beautiful Earth. Whether we can protect enough wild places from our insatiable needs and desires until we come to our senses remains to be seen, but it's worth maintaining the effort even when it seems to be going against the odds.

Sometimes a little bit of the wild shows its resilience even in the city I live in, but I'm glad I still have access to wilder lands without having to travel too far. If I bring my camera along on those weekend excursions, I will not attempt to document the man-made crap I find (or dog-made, left in bags along the trails). I will not ignore it, but I won't let it ruin the one day a week that I have to commune with nature and share my vision of the wild through the art of photography. My work is self-expression through an art form, and maybe some people would call it eco porn since it isn't directed toward a conservation goal. But I hope I'm not contributing to a false sense of security. All of the protected natural lands in which I do photography were fought for. The lands are enjoyed by everyone, but they were won by conservationists. 

In any event, the idea of "eco porn" was a wake-up call for nature photographers. The International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP) was formed just a short while ago, in 2005. I'm glad there are so many professional nature photographers now working, like other well-known photographers before them, for conservation goals, producing compelling images of what we still have left "out there." Even so, let's all contribute what we can to the art of conservation.

(P.S. Thanks go to Ed Hamrick at Vuescan for helping me get my old scanner fired up! I bought a license back in 2002, and Ed still had the receipt info I should have kept myself. The scanner drivers are built right into the software, and it now runs 64-bit. Sweet!)

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Wowed By Nature

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The February 2017 issue of Lenswork opens with an editorial inspired by Brooks Jensen's encounter with a gallery owner in New York who was dismissive of landscape photography. Apparently there's even a pejorative acronym going around--ARAT--for "Another Rock, Another Tree."

I was thinking about that as I poked around among the rocks and trees along Lagunitas Creek. I thought of several possible explanations for the attitude of those gallery owners, but in the end I figure they are business people, and if they don't have a ready market or can't figure out how to create a taste for landscape photography, they are going to blame the artwork.

Interestingly, Brooks Jensen does much the same thing. Even though the gallery owner snubbed him and sniffed at Lenswork as being a ghetto of landscape photography, he nevertheless blames photographers for missing the mark. I imagine the dismissive gallery owner feeling a sense of satisfaction for inducing such self-flagellation.

"Cameras make wonderful copy machines," Jensen writes. "but if that's all they do, the resulting photographs may not rise to the level of art.... Art is something you make, not something you merely record." After delivering this scolding he writes that an artistic image is "unique," "wonderful," "insightful," and "inspiring."

However, even if the photograph possesses all of those attributes, the gallery owner who can't sell it is still going to dismiss it. All those qualities that make an image "art" are subjective. An image that moves you might not move the person standing next to you. A landscape image that connects you to an inner sense of what is simultaneously beautiful and sad about life might make the person standing next to you yawn. The image of a moment captured in time might suddenly bond you to the eternal stillness deep within your own being, while the person next to you looks at you like you're nuts.

In the editorial, Brooks does defend the aesthetic of landscape photography, writing, "It's not the rock nor the tree that are important, but the meaning, the expression, the connection that counts." This isn't the first time I've heard such sentiment, and I couldn't disagree more. The rock and the tree are crucial. If you're out there with the idea that the landscape and all the living beings, seen and unseen, that occupy it--all the movements of wind and water, of energy from the sun and nourishment from the soil--are unimportant, why bother? And if you are just copy machine who nevertheless makes the gallery owners go "Wow!" over you, are you an artist?

My wife was telling me about a middle-school student who is bereft over being rejected for admission to San Francisco's School of the Arts. I hope that student is able to remain true to her artistic self when she enters a high school full of people who yawn an art, or who turn away from art they can't make money on. Hopefully that student will find a few sympatico friends and even a grown-up or two who can help her keep that lamp lit and bring out her inner mounting flame.

When I look at the image at the top of this post, I see an exuberant chaos of life that nevertheless embodies a compositional order that I can only discover for myself, and which gives me profound joy. In all the years I've been publishing this blog, I have been trying to share my sense of being wowed by nature, and also to spark that recognition, that mysterious conjunction of outside and inside, that makes art out of rocks and trees--and thee.

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Storm Wrack

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I tried to drive out around the north side of Mt. Tam this morning, but Fairfax-Bolinas Road is closed again. There must have been more storm damage -- and so soon after they reopened the route! They were closed for months last time, and the closure this time begins in the same place, up by the Azalea Hill parking lot. 

I turned around and went for a drive along Lagunitas Creek, making a pit stop at the Cronin Fish Viewing Area. I crossed the street to check out the Ink Wells and almost went back for my camera. I couldn't quite get the angle I wanted, though, so I just took a brain picture. Sorry I can't share it. I did not see any salmon splashing up the falls or anything like that. Just a lovely scene that was a bit too cluttered in the foreground.

I continued past Sam Taylor Redwoods and was struck by the beauty of the forest along the creek. There's often nowhere to pull over at such times, but this time I was able to park at Devil's Gulch and walk a short way back along the road until I found a place to drop down to the creek. I followed a set of raccoon tracks in the sand and stopped to make a few photographs. You can see the big dam of flood debris in this image and the one above it (the lower image is cropped from the upper one). Note the debarking of the standing alders. That'll give you an idea how high the creek flooded.

I didn't go far upstream because this nice open area soon morphed under a darker tree canopy.

This buckeye seed was rooting into very shallow soil on a boulder patched with lichen, moss and polypody. It would be interesting to check up on it again in a few months to see how it fares.

Just as I was about to cut away from the creek and up to the road I spotted something out of the corner of my eye. It was a deer skull with only one antler still attached and most of its flesh peeled off. It's grisly business to get caught in a flood. Hopefully this buck was already dead when it got swept away.

I took this selfie just to make my wife jealous. She is the one who found this huge bay laurel in Bear Valley, and it instantly became one of her favorite trees. Mine too. In the fenced field behind the visitor center I scouted for badgers to no avail, but counted twenty-four deer browsing in the grass. Closer to the visitor center building, over by the electric car charging area, there were more quail than I could count, either pecking along the ground or sunning themselves on the wooden fenceposts.

Although I did stop at the tree, I wasn't really in the mood to do a whole Pt. Reyes thing without my wife, so I circled back toward Mt. Tam and drove up Bolinas-Fairfax Road. Chilly offshore winds were howling over the ridge, and I scouted in vain for bobcats or coyotes. I parked to take a walk in the woods and spotted this little banana slug pushed up against some mushrooms. It sensed my presence and seemed in no hurry to actually start feeding, so I took a quick photo and continued on my way. When I finally returned to the car maybe a half-hour later, the slug was about two inches away from the apparently uneaten mushrooms (I didn't check the gills, which is the part slugs often relish). Life in the fast lane.

This toothed jelly fungus was just about the only fungus I saw on my little walk. This guy is probably about an inch tall. It's not super-wet up there despite all the rain. I'm disappointed that I couldn't get a look at Alpine Lake to see if it's full. Last time I was there (Nov. 20), the bathtub ring was at least twenty feet high.

Here's a crop of the jelly fungus showing its teeth. They have been known to bite, so they should always be treated with care. I was surprised as I continued my walk to have my trail crossed by a group of four women who didn't know where they were or where they were going. They were just having a ball, out exploring. I told them the road was one way, the creek the other, and they charged off toward the creek.

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