Other World

Bishop Pines in pea soup fog. Bodega Bay.

Tufts on the road to Tomales.

Ground Fog. Taos, New Mexico.

Years ago, I wrote an article replete with ten photographs from my Fog Series. Nearly all were from the California coast starting in Cayucos on the midcoast to West Marin and Sonoma on the north. Much of this glorious stretch was first imprinted on my brain more than 75 years ago when my mother and I lived in Salinas then Oakland and San Leandro. The rugged coast so often blanketed with fog and the oak studded coastal hills and valleys are my first memories of terrain and place. Visions of them tug at my heart like no other.

Those feelings continue to draw me to coastal California. For several years before COVID I made the pilgrimage to the coast every year. It was usually in September and that was meant to coincide with the vendage or grape harvest. If my main goal was to photograph the coast, visiting wineries was a very close second. I began those efforts in Paso Robles on the inland side of the Coastal Range since it is the closest wine mecca when driving I-40 across northwestern New Mexico, northern Arizona and California’s Central Valley. It’s a 16-hour haul so I often stay in Tehachapi or Bakersfield. 14 hours has proven to be my daily limit. At 14 I’m sleep driving at 80mph.

As I write this entry, itself a draft for my September-October issue of Shadow and Light Magazine, I’m planning another wine and photography safari for the second week of September.

True to my new mantra Less is More I’ll include three images in several posts. These examples from the Fog Series are more intimate and abstract than those in my article six years ago. They appear soft focused even blurred. For the most part there are neither black blacks or white whites. It's more about shapes than details. One feels the dampness and silence.