It is all about the light

Checking in

Central Valley series is often met with little enthusiasm. Feedback is minimal and people do not seem to engage with the larger vision I am trying to articulate.

I know the answer is to keep shooting, yet distractions keep intruding. Work, especially, has a way of colliding with the moments I need most: the rare days when clouds roll in and the landscape finally takes on the mood I’m after.

The relentless fog

It has been the foggiest winter here in Central California as far back as I can remember. Every day in the morning I dwell through a wall of fog to my prison cell (day job). I love the fog, but not for driving.

Fog softens the landscape while making highliting the main subject. It strips scenes of excess, collapsing distance and muting contrast so that form, tone, and gesture take precedence. In this suspended space, photographs often feel quieter, more introspective, and charged with a sense of transience, as if the image itself might soon disappear.

The vision

Perched on a bare, reaching branch, the vulture (a bird of endings) waits. Where others pass through, it remains. Above it, ducks cross the frame, lifting into the fog, each body fading a little more than the last. Feathers dissolve into light until flight becomes suggestion, then absence. They do not disappear all at once; they thin, their shapes gradually surrendering.

The fog settles into a soft forgetting. It does not so much divide life from death as blur the boundary between them. Motion gives way to stillness, form loosens its hold, and what was once legible drifts toward the unnameable.

The vulture stands as keeper of aftermaths, a witness to what cannot continue. In this contrast, the image finds its quiet truth: life moves on by disappearing, while death stays by waiting. Nothing here is violent or abrupt. The birds fade, the fog receives them, and the patient vulture holds the space where endings come to rest.

The photoshoot

On Jan 15, 2024, I drove to the Grey Lodge Natural Preserve. The fog was dense when I took the FEATURED PHOTOGRAPH (f/14, 1/320s, ISO 640).

Other Images considered for the collection

Previous posts about the collection

• The gate is locked – the beauty and bleakness of California’s Central Valley- a new project;
• The beauty and bleakness of California’s Central Valley- part two;
• The beauty and bleakness of California’s Central Valley- part three;
• The beauty and bleakness of California’s Central Valley- part four;
• The beauty and bleakness of California’s Central Valley- part five;
• The beauty and bleakness of California’s Central Valley- part six;
• The beauty and bleakness of California’s Central Valley- part seven;
• The beauty and bleakness of California’s Central Valley – part eight;
• The beauty and bleakness of California’s Central Valley- part nine- Magic Rays;
• Winter photography in Butte County: Another image from the Gray Lodge Wildlife Area;
• Winter photography in Colusa County: Sacramento Wildlife Refuge and migratory birds;

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Wall Art Botanical Images

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Wall Art landscapes and miscellaneous

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