Category: photos
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Macro San Miguel
I’ve always found something simultaneously appealing and off-putting about California missions. The architecture nestles with organic seamlessness into the surrounding environment (aesthetic intent as necessity, perhaps, since at the time local building materials were likely the only viable option, but still). On the other hand there’s the way they were built and maintained: typically with indigenous laborers who, even if they came…
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Subject and Object
On the first day of my first metaphysics class, the professor asked a student to count the objects in the room. She confidently totted up the people, the desks, and had started working on the whiteboards and pens when he interrupted her. “What about the chair legs?” She looked perplexed for a moment. “Or the screws…
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Lessons Learned at the Aquarium
A weekend in Monterey and 683 photos later, I have made certain discoveries. Photography lessons learned: Social lessons learned: Monterey Aquarium California, March 2014 (for higher resolution versions see SmugMug gallery)
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Spring
I’ve lived in Atascadero for seventeen years and towards the end of every winter I become a fretful Demeter waiting for Persephone: unconvinced that thistime the decimated, disconsolate yard will emerge from Hades. It always seems to, mostly. The fragile, fragrant white apricot blossoms peek out first, their temerity usually rewarded by a crushing late…
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Faces of Monterey
Monterey always catches me a little off guard when I visit. Growing up in Southern California I was accustomed to beach grunge chic: wind and salt and the scouring sands made a pristine exterior out of reach for even the most dedicated (and wealthy) residents and merchants. Beachside buildings were always a little bit dirty,…
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Birds, Water, and Lazy Weekends
As my SmugMug galleries can attest, I love taking photos of birds. So when Skip’s boss loaned us his telephoto lens my first thought was to head out to Atascadero Lake and its teeming flocks of ducks and geese and grebes, with the occasional swan drifting elegantly among them, to see what I could see.…
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Being Candid
Sometimes I wish I enjoyed photographing landscapes more. They’re so blessedly…stationary. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about taking pictures of children and wildlife during even my short tenure behind a camera, it’s that it’s extremely difficult to capture them in their natural state. One tends to run towards you, the other away. I…
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Eighty Six Christmases
I suppose I feel as if it’s my job, along with taking care of my mother’s financial and medical affairs, to try to convince her that as long as she’s alive there is joy to be found, at least occasionally, somewhere, from something. In pistachio ice cream or lights on a Christmas tree or a…
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New Camoldoli Hermitage
I had been looking forward to a few days alone at New Camaldoli with unseemly eagerness. When August arrived I had a broken elbow, a dodgy lower back, and a fretful elderly mother who thought I was going specifically so I’d be out of her cell phone range. I spent the week restless and preoccupied.…
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Atascadero Lake
Atascadero is a town of about 30,000 inhabitants nestled between more well-regarded siblings San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles. It was founded in the early 1900s as a utopian colony by an entrepreneur who was indicted several times for mail fraud and who perhaps didn’t realize that his beloved community’s name, loosely translated from the…
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