This photograph was taken on the shore of Stillwater Bay. The path leads to Pebble Beach, and I was surprised by how many people I found wandering through the outskirts of the course, having climbed this well trodden path.
Morning Dew
This photograph was taken just after dawn on Little Talbot Island, north of Jacksonville, Florida. It was one of the first macro photographs I took, and it remains one of my favorites. I love how it captures the pendant dewdrop and the weight of the driftwood branch and the water. The little bubbles add an interesting depth of field.
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Hooker Falls
Daylight on the Davidson
“The gray-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
checkering the eastern clouds with streaks of light…”
-Shakespeare
This photograph was taken at dawn in the Pisgah National Forest on the banks of the Davidson River. The sun through the dappled leaves left streaks in the dewy air, which I attempted to capture in this photograph. The shadow-play made the exposure a bit tricky, but overall I have always enjoyed this photograph and its even its color version. We are venturing back to the Pisgah in December, and I look forward to capturing even more scenes of the rivers and falls once there.
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Bixby Canyon Bridge
I descended a dusty gravel ridge
Beneath the Bixby Canyon Bridge
Until I eventually arrived
At the place where your soul had died
Beneath the Bixby Canyon Bridge
Until I eventually arrived
At the place where your soul had died
Barefoot in the shallow creek,
I grabbed some stones from underneath
And waited for you to speak to me
I grabbed some stones from underneath
And waited for you to speak to me
And the silence; it became so very clear
That you had long ago disappeared
I cursed myself for being surprised
That this didn’t play like it did in my mind
That you had long ago disappeared
I cursed myself for being surprised
That this didn’t play like it did in my mind
-Death Cab for Cutie
This photograph of the Bixby Canyon Bridge in Big Sur, California, just after dawn shows the marine layer lifting from the bay, slowly creeping up the mountains, only to burn off completely by the early afternoon. The bridge spanning Bixby Creek is one of many on Route 1 down the coast of California south of Carmel, but it is probably the most famous. The bridge has a rich history, opening in 1932 to connect the residents of Big Sur with Carmel and San Francisco further to the north. When it was built, it was the longest concrete arch span the west coast. It remains one of the tallest single-span concrete bridges in the world. It is narrower (by eight feet) than the required width of modern bridges, but due to its historic relevance, expansion is unlikely.
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River of Ice
On the list of the most beautiful natural places I have ever been, Alaska ranks at the very top. This glacier may have had a name, but so many others did not. There were simply too many of them. Beauty was within reach at every point on this trip, whether it was seeing the salmon in the rivers towards the end of their annual run, coming upon a group of ten bald eagles on the bank of a fjord, or paddling next to a huge river of ice that creeps along ever so slowly, carving mountains in its wake. The force and the majesty of the state was almost overwhelming at times. I could not capture it all, but this photograph is a stunning reminder of my trip there. I cannot wait to go back with a renewed focus (and a better camera) to document the awe inspiring beauty of untouched nature.
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Roil
This photograph was taken on a blustery morning in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. The winds were coming through the bay at a fierce clip, and the waves were the largest I had ever seen. We went on a hike to Point Lobos, and I captured this scene after one of the larger waves had crashed across the rocks – completely covering them in a mix of foam and roil. One of the apocryphal origins to the name Aphrodite is “risen from the foam,” but I cannot imagine that this was the type of scene the ancients envisioned of her birth. I think Botticelli got it right. The violence of the waves made me marvel at the strength of the stone, which has invariably been battered for eons. Love is like that in many ways, often beaten but never broken…so perhaps the ancients were onto something…
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Tempest
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
-Shakespeare, The Tempest
This photograph was taken on the moors outside of Haworth, England earlier this year. It was cloudless until dusk, when shadows crept over the heather, and tempestuous clouds filled the sky. The rock in the foreground is a landmark that can be seen for miles, and indeed it can be seen from the house which Anna’s grandfather built stone by stone from an old ostler house. It is but a pinpoint on the horizon from the house, and we trekked miles up and down (and up again) through the heather and sheep until we reached it. The views, as can be seen here, and in the gallery “The Moors” were breathtaking, and though I cursed Anna’s mother and uncle for taking us on such a hard-fought scramble up the moors, it was indeed worth it in the end. And in the end, as the Bard said, “what’s past is prologue.”
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Through the Ferns
In 2006, I took the trip of a lifetime. After decades studying literature and Latin, I stood in Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s home, and amongst the columns in the forum of Pompeii. We were young then, Anna and I, but to this day we love traveling with our families whether in North Carolina, or Alaska, or England where we were engaged and where this photograph was taken. I saw many marvelous sights on that trip–Marseilles, Mallorca, and all of the little English hamlets we visited like Grasmere. This photograph of a well-trod path through the bracken ferns was taken in the Lake District in Northwest England. Though you cannot tell from the perspective of the photograph, the bracken are as tall as I was, and the white and black sheep cloistered themselves between the fronds. I felt a bit like Alice, dwarfed by the thick blanket of beautiful green ferns. The Lake District truly is a wonderland, and I cannot wait to return.
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Skagway Mist
This small panorama was taken from the bow of a ship in the Inside Passage in Alaska, near Skagway. To call the nature in Alaska untamed would be an understatement. The glaciers are so plentiful that some have no names, and the fjords stretch for days. All of the stones have stories, variegated and striated like this one from eons of ebbing and flowing tides. The morning mist was a beautiful phenomenon, which I attempted to capture in this photograph. It blanketed everything in a soft, dense fog, which sometimes did not burn off until well into the afternoon, when the blue skies brought out the deep cerulean of the glaciers. Although beautiful in full color, I felt that the black and white of this photograph worked ever so well with the natural contrasts of the subject.
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ST. AMAND PHOTOGRAPHY 