The Photography of Scott St. Amand
I took the photograph of this pod of pelicans off of Point Lobos, in Carmel, California. This is only the front of a much longer line of pelicans that was flying down the coast, and I thought the panorama captured them nicely against the bay and the creeping marine layer. I love how they are all in different stages of flight, some coasting and some flapping frenetically.
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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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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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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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This photograph, which is part of my Solitary collection, was taken a little after sunrise on the banks of Stillwater Cove in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, just below Pebble Beach. The photograph is hazy, as the Soberanes fire was burning uncontrolled in the highlands during our visit, casting everything in a sepia glow. This little sailboat was bobbing amongst the bull kelp and sea otters that frequent the cove. I was captivated by the lone person on the bow of the boat, who sat there unaffected by the world that was only a hundred yards or so from him. I, too, was by myself this morning, lost in the beauty of the cove, though the dogs on their morning walks brought me back to reality as they rollicked in the waves.
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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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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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This photograph is a morning panorama of the Pebble Hill golf course just outside of Carmel, California. In fact, the photograph was taken on the beach of Carmel Bay. Beyond the point at the far left of the photograph is Spyglass Cove, where I have sat a number of times and just watched the sea otters and harbor seals bob between the long, whip-like strands of bull kelp.
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ST. AMAND PHOTOGRAPHY 