After the gale.

A month ago at Indian Point a winter storm roared through here: big breakers, surf, thrashing trees and the immense sound of the wind rushing through the forest. Today is calm. The rolls of cloud stretch to the horizon of distant Islands in the Salish Sea. The forest floor is now carpeted with green branches, the ones that somehow missed me as I dodged around taking photos while drinking in the energy of the storm. Without the drama, what is there here today to make a worthwhile picture or two?

We have been inside our home or making dashes from car to stores in town for the past few days. Rain, rain, rain, in all its possible variations. Today only a few occasional drops still fall to keep water speckled, rocks shiny, the orange trunks of the arbutus and the green leaves of the salal gleaming in the grey light. This is what is on offer today if I can bring my sights down from action to contemplation.

I notice too that there have been furniture movements on the beach as well: familiar drift logs have moved on, the gravel beach has become steeper, little streams wind out of the undergrowth and hit the beach running. Al cleaned and washed and tidied. Fresh sheets of seaweed and accents of new jetsam and flotsam catch my eye. While photos are my aim, I am not adverse to a little beachcombing as well. Someone`s storm loss may be my lucky find today.

Fresh images, washed and glazed by rain, are my subjects today at Indian Point.

A Winter gale at Indian Point

The gale builds rapidly to forty knots. A winter south-easter is roaring across from Puget Sound and rushing up Fulford Harbour. Big waves, by our standards, crash upon the rocky shore and the wind screams among the trees of Indian Point. Here I am with my camera, perched on a cliff edge, leaning out to get just that perfect angle. I am happy today, there is something about being in a storm that makes the adrenaline flow and of course these conditions create great pictures.

The dangerous part of this walk today are the trees; the chances of a branch or a top being whipped loose and landing on me is high but I am on task, focussed on recording the action. Spectacular! Even among the shadowy trees it is easy to capture the blurred thrashing of the younger ones with a slow shutter speed, although pressing the camera against a large tree trunk for stability does not work as it usually does because even down close to their roots they too are stirring uneasily.

Further down the cliff edge trail I hear a voice behind me. A bearded fellow shouts that he thought he should warn me in case he startled me into leaping over the edge. I laugh and reply that if only my camera was rescued so Bill`s last photo could be saved! I catch up with him later back at the point facing into the storm. Just the two of us here, two people addicted to wind and wave.

He introduces himself as Derek Lundy and I realize that he is a writer about the sea and a sailor himself. I’ve even read one of his books about a square rigger sailing around the Horn, based on the life of an ancestor of his and say how I really liked it. A distant ancestor of mine was lost off the Horn so it had a real relevance for me. He mentions another book he has written about the Vendee Globe race. We part to follow our separate paths home.

A few days later I buy ‘Godforsaken Sea’ and find it a very well written book indeed and I have enough sea experience to move completely into the story. I finally get to the chapter where he interviews the sailors who race alone around the world nonstop through the Southern Ocean. As they talk about how the experience has affected them it is as if a door has opened for me. They are talking about the stuff that I have felt myself and had difficulty transmitting to others. All my sailing in the Pacific was well north of the Southern Ocean but I remember vividly how we repeated our mantra “Boring is good” while at sea because so often it seemed that the other side of routine was wild. Then there were those long, long voyages, especially the last leg home from Tarawa on the equator to Vancouver Island, - over two months, many thousands of miles, amid typhoons, squalls and westerly gales. When talking about the experience I have tried to compare it to war-time combat, living close to death, combined with a sense of the transcendence of the great oceans. During the final approach to Juan de Fuca Strait when it looked like we might survive after all, a sense of deliverance was mixed with a tremendous regret to be moving from this enormous experience back into the superficial, chatty world of human society. Extreme conditions beget extreme experiences and major changes in how we see the world.

No coincidence after all to meet a fellow sailor drinking in the powerful natural energy of a gale at Indian
Point.

http://www.dereklundy.com/  for Derek`s website. The windjammer book is 'The way of the Ship'

Bushwacking. A walk on the wild side



Bushwacking


It’s the beginning of February on Saltspring Island and the first green leaves are beginning to break bud. So far we have had a mild winter and this morning is warm and bright: time for a walk with my camera at Burgoyne Bay which is a fifteen minute drive across the south end of the island. Partway down the gravel road I pull over near the foundation rocks of an old building and begin to photograph the ruined rail fences and big maples against the looming cliffs of Mt. Maxwell. I have been spoiled recently by cloud-filtered light and find this glaring bright sunlight difficult to work with. The camera cannot handle the range of darks and lights anywhere near as well as my eyes do and the photos will be overly light and overly dark. Adjustable later on the computer to some degree of course, but I regret the filtered light of semi- cloudy days.

There was a light frost last night and as I walk across the fields of this heritage farm ( now a provincial park) the shady grasses are still white. The frost emphasises every detail. As I crest a rise and am about to enter another field I notice a path branching off to the left. A path never taken! Just follow it until I can see where it is going, I say to myself and begin an uphill course through the deep woods. In fifteen minutes I come to the park boundary and a private posted road blocks my progress into the unknown. Will I retrace my steps? Hardly! I find a sketchy trail that follows an old logging road and push through the broom and new young firs on a downhill course. Somewhere ahead is the top of another field. The trail peters out and I have another choice to make. Too late to go back now!

Soon I am wading through waist high salal, testing every step carefully, pushing through brambles and winding around old stumps. This is logged-off land and the new growth is really taking off. Deeper and deeper into the briar patch I wade. Looking up I can see that there are no treetops ahead so the field cannot be far off. The last hundred feet is a mess of young May trees with their sharp thorns and I am glad of my heavy canvas work jacket. I awkwardly step over an old wire fence and am out at last. This kind of off-the-beaten-path venturing really should not be rewarded with success. I am likely to do it again soon.

I walk across the fields to photograph in an alder swamp, visit with ducks and gulls on the shore of the bay and drop in on the old barn on my way back to my van. I get several good photos but I will mostly remember this morning for my little stroll on the wild side.

Beddis Beach. Action photography of the child kind.

One August day the family, us grandparents, our daughters and grandchildren, all drive down the road, over the hills and down to the ocean at Beddis Beach. On this rocky island, bathing beaches suitable for children are not that common. We park and walk down the leafy trail to the shore. A sunny day, the tide about half way up, several families sitting on beach logs or splashing warily in the shallows. Calm, except for the steady roll of waves from the passing stream of yachts out in Ganges Harbour. The little children run to the water and pause. Those waves! That four inch surf! With a shriek they rush in and with a shriek they run out again! That water is cold!

I have my camera of course, pictures of grandchildren are always in demand within the family ( and mostly not elsewhere), and I can see that this wild rushing in and out, the unselfconscious attitudes of these little bodies, has some interesting possibilities. I hate photos of children taken from adult eye level, small, big headed and down there, so I choose a reasonably wide angle to be sure I can capture a big enough slice of the scene and hand hold the camera at beach level. I will miss lots this way but with digital I can also take lots. Somewhere, sometime, if I keep clicking I might just catch something worth keeping.

This kind of photography requires a different approach from the carefully composed and organized shots of much landscape photography. It is all happening in the spit second, full of movement and changing expressions. Horizons angle wildly and add a sense of action. By the time I see a great shot it will be past so I set out to harvest images within a field of view relying on the beginning of an action sequence to prompt me to start shooting. I miss a lot and I catch a lot this way, but this approach feels appropriate to the subject, to the moment. Shriek!

Walking on the bottom of the sea

The sun is just cresting the dark bulk of Reginald Hill, the morning air carries the first chill of Autumn and at the head of Fulford Harbour the tide is far, far out. A sandy flat seems to stretch almost to the horizon. It is a vivid seaweedy green in the first rays of light. I stop the car and take my camera for a walk on the bottom of the sea.

Luckily I am in my rubber boots, the flats are streaming with water and masses of squishy weed (except, I notice that one boot is leaking and soaking my sock) , but now I am here it is difficult to make interesting images. A large, wet, green plain with a distant rim of water, hills and glaring sun. Somehow, I must capture the reality of the sea bottom in an interesting way. A photograph is not just a record of something else but a new creation with its own inner relationships. Just ahead I see three rocks and gratefully position them in the foreground of my composition. Now at last there is something happening, a triangular pattern organizes the picture and everything now is related to it. I grasp the vastness of the beach-scape in relation to these rocks.

The sun is dimmed by cloud for a few moments and the bright green and the glare disappear. The sand, the blankets of weed, are dark forms enclosing pools of cool light from the sky. This change in light is dramatic and makes a whole new series of photographs possible. I also begin to vary the angle of my photos, looking down on details at my feet or placing the camera at sand level. Suddenly, back comes the sun to reflect brightly in the pools. Down at the level of the sea bottom I see the detail, the rivulets, the roils of weed.

Still, I can only make so much of this and search for some new element. Way off down the beach a big waterlogged fir tree is semi sunk in the sand, its trunk and branches encased in mussels and flying streamers of weed. I walk that way, snapping as I go, because one never really knows what will turn out to be useful later. At my new subject I take several angles, settings and ‘zooms’ and finally I place the camera behind a seaweed-draped branch and shoot from within the cast shadow. No glare, but black arm and backlit weed.

Right down at the water`s edge it is obvious that while the beach water is still streaming to the sea, the ocean itself is quickly moving back inland. This is a place of shifting boundaries and amorphous reflections. In the half hour I have been on the beach the light has changed several times. Once again I need a form to anchor my image and just out there is a black piling left over from some log booming from years ago. I wade into the shallows to get a better angle (my foot cannot get any wetter), squat carefully so the seagull and top of the piling will jut above the hill beyond and click away. A few boat waves rustle the sea`s calm surface.

I walk back along the steeper upper beach to the rattle of pebbles under my feet, the occasional down-spiral of maple leaves and dark shadows under overhanging branches. I begin to look away from the sun toward the brightly lit shore; branches, sun-bleached logs, big rocks, brightly coloured leaves. There is plenty of structure here, it is now a matter of selection, of isolating a few powerful shapes, colours and textures. The very opposite design problem from the flat beach behind me which is now rapidly filling with the sea once more.

Back at my car I pause to look back over the bay. In an hour I have taken many photos, mostly in difficult lighting conditions. I have explored a beach and found ways to tell its story in images. When I started, I simply walked down to the briefly exposed bottom of the sea and started interacting with this place with no clear agenda or idea of how to photograph it. An adventure! What I found there was partly the beach at low tide, partly the rising sun and time of year but also what I myself brought to it in terms of my picture making experience and preferences. That was actually hard work of the creative kind: camera settings, lens choices, shooting angles, the ability to visualize what this particular shot would look like in picture form. A challenge ready for me to take up. The satisfaction of working with a camera to picture something so transient, so dazzled in light on this early Fall morning.

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Note. Many who live on the island have seen the big petroglyph boulder between the cedars at Drummond Park, a reminder that there were people here for thousands of years before us recent immigrants arrived. There is a story that once that broad shallow beach, where the big boulder originally sat, was dry land until the great waves of a storm or tsunami claimed it back for the sea. Perhaps there was at one time a gravel bar, a lagoon and a village here that was swept away. It may even be a long ago memory from a time of rising sea levels. To walk far out into that weedy world is to step into prehistory a little. In the glaring light, the falling leaves, the moving tide, is an ancient world speaking to us.

The raft people #5 They reach the sea at last.

When I started this model adventure series it was a chance to try out my new mini camera,( a Samsung T 70. ) I had become hooked on the possibilities of model photography earlier with a series I had done with a paper model canoe and its two paddlers and thought that a raft and modeling clay characters sailing on my pond would be fun to try. By combining a real photo of an imaginary scene with some photoshopping touch-ups I had developed a photo technique for storytelling in picture form.( Hang on, isn`t that movies?)

The raft people sailed on the pond ( a large lake to them) and then lived through an icy winter, - even ice sailing through a blizzard. With Spring, they dismantled their raft and built two narrow ones for following the stream to the sea. We met them last, portaging around a waterfall.

The scene opens with the raft reassembled and sailing along a long sandy shoreline. They sight a sailing ship that dwarfs their own raft ( the ‘Monshulu’, see Eric Newby`s ‘The last Grain Race’) and sail hard to catch up. They surge alongside and find the ship is in difficulties, trapped in shoaling waters. Before they know it the ship is broadside in the surf and the raft, which draws little water, can be of assistance even though waves are sweeping their decks. The dinghy is launched to carry a line to the Monshulu, but, alas, it fills with water and the paddler is lost ( raft people do not float).

An anchor is eventually carried out to deeper water, the ship is warped off and saved, but the three raft survivors have some difficult decisions to make. To carry on along this unfamiliar coastline with only three crewmembers or ship their raft as deck cargo on a voyage across the ocean. Will they struggle on or will they eventually sell the raft in Japan as raw logs?

The tangles. Westcoast Thoughts.

 While I have been making relatively bare and simple images in the past few months, - simplifying for strength and clarity -, I am also making complex images where the ‘point’ is clothed in layers of vegetation that are difficult to get past and really see what is going on. Mt. Maxwell is glimpsed through tangles, the little waves breaking on the beach are seen through branches, and the houseboat in the bay is sandwiched between tree trunks.

This is the reality of living on the raincoast that I am imaging here. We live at the foot of great trees and mountains and peer out at the world through the filters of our environment. It affects how we think; it is not easy to see the forms of our lives, the dominant pattern, through the crisscross of daily events and conflicting obligations.

So, these dense images that I make are important for me, are my reflection, but through my fascination for these interwoven lines and textures there is a crisscrossed web way of thinking developing for me as well. My world, my way of seeing it in its complexity of lines and shades of meaning.