THE VIEW FROM HERE
by Stephen Johnson

LA, Highway One and the Farallones

Busy last few weeks.....on a lecture tour in Los Angeles, out along the coast on my beloved Highway One with a workshop, and a Whale Watching trip out to the Farallon Islands off the San Francisco coast. Along the way were some good views, a bad fall, and a few more fascinations explored.

The LA trip had been in the works for awhile featuring a few Canon sponsored lectures on Fine Art Printing. As this is one of my favorite subjects to encourage, it was nice to talk about some of the details of working an image into the most beautiful print possible. This jives well with my own photographic experience and the history of photography for the last 75 years or so. The idea that making a fine print as a carefully crafted, iterative process that requires time, testing and very high standards, sits well with my values and the prints that seduced me into caring about photography as art form.

Steve Showing Prints at the LA Center for Photography. 2015. Photo by Eric Joseph.

The challenge with the lectures is fitting the material into a few hours of presentation. I keep trying as so many requests are coming in for this exact lecture. Much can be done in a few hours, but so much more in a longer workshop, like my Maine Fine Art Printing class in September.

It was good to see so many acquaintances and friends at the Adobe Technology Exchange in Lakewood. I've enjoyed talking to this group over the years.

The talk at the Los Angeles Center for Photography was a great experience with some very old friends in attendence. It seems Julia Dean has built a very nice program there, and I will be back.

I met some great new people along the way in LA, such as Eric Joseph of Freestyle Photo who has clearly devoted time and energy to helping people understand and value the digital printing process. .I also was pleased to meet Paul Dupont who has been making profiles for many years with a unique dedication. Paul reconnected me with old friends in the color management world and it was good to have some discussions about how things could be made better with someone that understands the process. I'll look forward to more such talks.

There was a whole world of conferences on digital imaging that began in the early 1990s, MacWorld, Seybold, the original Photoshop Conference. Now there are very few left. I miss the camaraderie and sense of community very much. I miss the new friends that came out of those experiences. It was also a great forum for exchanging information, ideas and sharing challenges. There are very few venues left, PhotoPlus in NYC among them, and many friends are drifting into being distant friends.

Arrival Arbor. The Getty. 2015

While in LA, we also spent some time at the Getty. Although I had been down for an opening many years ago for a show with my work in it, I had never really had a chance to explore the museums and grounds. It was a wonderful experience, with interesting architecture and a great location.

The Getty. 2015

My Highway One Coastal workshop followed a few days later which took us back down to places I dearly love and are always a pleasure to share with my students. Pebble Beach, Butano Redwoods, the Fitzgerald Reserve are high points.

I took a bad fall at Pebble Beach. I climbed up a rock to get some elevation on some of the beach rocks and to do a few images of my students working. On coming down, I lost my footing from about 7 feet up, falling to my back hard on the rock, then flipping head over heals to land on the beach pebbles and rocks flat on my back. I could have easily been severely injured, and those that saw the fall did not think I would be getting up. By some good fortune, or instinctive fall move, I was uninjured, sustaining only some sore muscles and wounded pride. I think I must have picked up some seaweed on my shoes that I was unaware of, and the grip I had going up, gave way as I was coming down.

Fall Rock. Pebble Beach

Following Pebble Beach we headed for the quiet beauty of the Butano Redwoods, exploring both large and small subjects. I was moving slowly and rather deliberately after my fall, but the Redwood forest was healing.

Sometimes the small things are the details that catch our eye. The simple motion and tiny waves of the creek running over leaves was as interesting to me as the majestic trees themselves.

Leaf and Butano Creek. 2015. Click for video.

The following weekend Fiona treated me to an early birthday gift of a trip out to our mysterious Farallon Islands on a whale watching cruise. The Farallones are islands about 25 miles offshore, west of San Francisco. Made of the same granite as the southern Sierra, these rocks have been moving northward along the edge of the Pacific Plate for 90 million years and were the distant shoreline off San Francisco just 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age. Now a wildlife sanctuary and research station, the islands were once the egg supply for Gold Rush flush San Francisco.

We had beautiful weather, a slight overcast and calm seas, even west of the Farallones facing the mighty Pacific. It was a good glimpse, seeing in person the rocks I've seen portrayed by Watkins and Muybridge, and further feeding the imagination of future fog encounters and new vistas.

Eadweard Muybridge. 1871.

Apparently Muybridge was hired by the Lighthouse Board to photograph a number of lighthouses for $20/day. The Farallon stop was one of many.

As silhouettes on the distant horizon, the Farallones are iconic, but largely unknown. There are certainly aerial photos and maps easy to access, but there is something different about sailing up to the islands and slowly seeing their contours and dimensions revealed. It did seem a bit like unraveling a mystery, seeing the relationships between cove and tower, old trails and wind blown starkness.

I want to go back.

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