A Day at the Beach

A golden moon hung in a starlit sky. Three rocket ships blasted by; fading orange contrails marked their passing. A twisted landscape lay below, multi-colored layers of rock reflecting eons of slow geologic movement. A distant peak seemed to kiss the moon. If I could make my way there, perhaps I could too. But the landscape was captivating, and I just wanted to sit for a while. To let my eyes roam into every nook and cranny. To take it all in.

As I wandered back and forth over this alien land, my imagination kept leading the way. Over there a strange beast was raging at the light. Nearby, a goat – or maybe it was a dog, or a rat – peered back at me, its eyes bright with curiosity (or was it hunger?). Elsewhere a strange cone-shaped man flapped his giant lips. Over there, a skull; someone in sunglasses gave it a sidelong glance as a fish swam by. I spied a mushroom cloud in the distance, frozen in time just past the point of detonation.

*He railed against the injustice of it all, to no avail.*

No, this wasn’t some drug-addled fever dream. Nor a midnight terror. I was down on the Monterey Peninsula , where I spent a couple of hours creating abstract compositions of the rocky tidepools and shoreline at Weston Beach in Point Lobos (named in memory of Edward Weston, at the suggestion of his friend, Ansel Adams). Everywhere I turned, there was something new to explore. Piles of smoothly weathered stones laced with reds, yellows and blues. Ragged tidepools, brimming with life. Tilted layers of wet sandstone, glistening in the sun, punctuated here and there with seaweed and shells. The tide slowly creeping in, creating a wash of reflections and patterns under a bright blue sky.

So where do you start? Creating abstract images is much different from shooting an iconic landscape. No parking lot or sign (Kodak Picture Spot No. 24!) waits to show you where to stop or what to look at. No strong point of interest dominates the view, riveting your attention (or your camera). Rather, it is up to you to find the interest and distill it out of the chaos. Sometimes that happens in the field, and other times it doesn’t until later, when you are developing and processing the images. Either way, the art is in the seeing, not the technical details about how the image was made.

And seeing is difficult, particularly when exploring a place you haven’t been before. Your mind explodes with possibilities. Look there! No, here. Wait! What’s that over there? You can quickly become overwhelmed. The only antidote is to slow down. Look around. Remind yourself that you can come back again. Promise yourself that you will.

Then take a deep breath.

Find something that captures your interest. Sit with it for a while. Explore the possibilities. Move around, see how it changes as you alter your perspective. Notice how your thoughts and feelings change as well. Go look at something else, then come back.

You never know what will emerge out of the chaos. What will attract your attention or capture your imagination. What you will have to say.

Fortunately, I had others there to remind me to do just that. I was at the beach with William Neill and Richard Martin, and a dozen other avid and accomplished photographers who were attending a conference put on by the folks at Out of Chicago. Richard and Bill are masters at making order out of chaos, and their finely honed sense of design, as reflected in the images they have created over decades of work, served as inspiration for our thoughtful meander around the small rocky cove.

As we set out that morning, Neill and Martin left us with a few words of advice. Mostly, just to be present. To try to look past what things were – rocks, pebbles, shells, sea creatures, and the like – and see what else was there. To be aware of shapes, lines, textures, colors, spaces and forms, and to notice the relationships among them. That, and point your camera straight down, parallel to the ground, to give you a better chance of keeping everything in focus when you click the shutter.

As we spread out around the small rocky cove, we each gravitated to something different that captured our attention. And how could we not? We had each brought our own unique blend of thoughts, feelings, interests, knowledge and abilities to the beach. That human gestalt of experience and emotion pulled us in different directions, leading us to create our own individual interpretations of the landscape … so long as we could be brave enough and confident enough to recognize those feelings and let them out.

“A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.” -- Wynn Bullock

The longer we stayed on the beach, the easier it became to free my mind from the constraints of reality. To look past the prominent features of the landscape, and ignore the sight and sound of others around me. To begin to feel the connections between stone, water, weather and time. I barely scratched the surface of what was there to explore. But I came away satisfied that the images I made reflected, at least to some degree, not just what I had seen but also what I had thought and felt while I was there. And I look forward to going back.

Weston Beach, Point Lobos, CA. March 27, 2024, Fujifilm GFX 50R & GF 120mm macro.