Along Sourdough Trail

Water is endlessly fascinating, like fire, especially when moving. It’s an overall impression and the sense of movement that we perceive; it’s impossible to capture and contemplate the instantaneous form of the water surface. That’s precisely what a camera can allow us to do, of course.

The result is an image that, because of its stillness, fascinates by pulling me in to examine those amazing squiggles. This is the leisurely appreciation denied me by the original subject.

The closer I look, the more compelling it becomes. The only limit is the resolution of my camera sensor. And even that is a pretty soft limit, since this sort of image can look good even soft.

These elegant patterns appear as decoration of the surface, but in fact they are reflections of branches, cloud, and sky. In what sense is this a photograph of water?

Yesterday I went for an evening run along Sourdough Trail, my first of the season. New leaves are just reaching out from the buds; the air is thick with expectation. But bareness still dominates, and the hard light from the west seemed a challenge. Here is where I started to learn about that light, though it was the leaf-filtered summer light that originally attracted me. For two years I photographed along this mile of path and stream. I thought I might be done with it, but apparently not.

In this coming year, I want to return to Sourdough Trail to deepen my practice and experience. Like many photographers, I tend to write in statements that I photograph to engage a place, to learn about it—and myself—in a particular way. What is that way? What can one actually learn and how? This blog is an attempt to cast some light on the process.