Tag: Carmel Bay California

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Awash

SSA Photography (183 of 400)

I have lived near the ocean my whole life, and yet it took my first trip to the California coast to truly admire the beauty of the sea.  The rocks and the waves are gorgeous in and of themselves, but together they are magical.  This photograph captures the instant when the two come together to produce an ephemeral wisp of beauty.  But for my camera capturing the fleeting moment, this little crash would have been forgotten, lost beneath the weight of the others that have come after it.  My fascination with the waves and the rocks can be seen in my collection California Waves.  I hope you enjoy this instant as much as I have.  The Romantics–Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley–all tried to capture that one infinite moment in words.  I will never have the words to capture it like they did; but then, they didn’t have a lens…

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Rivulets

 

SSA Photography (272 of 400)

The beauty of the coastline of California is undeniable.  The  Pacific is magnetic, and I am drawn back to the West Coast when I am away for any length of time.  This outcropping, just off the coast of Carmel-by-the-Sea, fascinates me, and I spent quite a while trying to capture a photograph to do it justice.  I wanted to take one of the august waves crashing over the top, but ultimately I was struck by the hidden power of the little silent rivers that have carved away the stone over the millennia.  There is no great force to the rivulets; they work by sheer repetition and determination.  The streams of water cascade over the outcropping each time even a moderately sized wave crashes upon the rock, carrying a grain of sand or two, and slowly they peel away the layers of the hard stone – a testament to the often-hidden power of nature.

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Aesacus

SSA Photography (253 of 400)

This panorama was taken near Carmel Point, the southernmost point of the coastline in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.  The title, Aesacus, alludes to the myth memorialized in Chapter 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  The youth Aesacus fell in love with Hesperia.  As he pursued her, she was bitten by a snake and died.  Aesacus gives a brief soliloquy lamenting her death, which he says was caused by him and the snake equally.  The sentence after his speech contains one of my favorite images in Augustan-era poetry: “Dixit et e scopulo, quem rauca subederat unda, se dedit in pontum.”  (“So he spoke, and from the cliff, which the rough waves had eaten away below, he gave himself to the sea.”)  As Aesacus fell, the ocean goddess Tethys took pity on him and changed him into a diving bird.  Watching the five diving birds in the photograph flying between rocks (eaten away by the sea) made me think at once of the Aesacus myth, which gave the scene such a mournful subtext.

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Ordo Saxae

SSA Photography (197 of 400)

I find patterns in nature fascinating.  “Ordo Saxae” is Latin for a row of rocks.  As is always the case, there is something lost in translation – not only is it a row, but there is an order (ordo) about the perfect arrangement of the outcropping.  These particular rocks reach out across Carmel Bay towards Point Lobos State Natural Reserve.  The linear quality of the jagged rocks is offset by the jumbled ones in the foreground, but my eye keeps going back to the organic ordo ab chao of the rocks that stretch out towards Point Lobos in the distance.

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Marine Layers

SSA Photography (177 of 400)

This photograph was taken just after dawn in Point Lobos State Natural Reserve in Carmel, California.  The stratification in the photo is a result of the low “marine layer” rolling in over the bay, which layer forms in the summer months as the warmer air above the Pacific is cooled by the ocean waters.  The resulting gradient was interesting in full color, but I felt that the monochromatic layers gave the photograph a more distinct presence, which is set off nicely by the black and white gull.

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