The Watchman

The next couple of blogs will be a bit lighter and less academic than the last couple of them. School is beginning this week, we are trying to build some new web pages, and the heat has been a little draining. I am going to highlight photos on the website that I really like, that also have an interesting backstory associated with their creation. While many of these photos "look easy", that just ain't necessarily so.

The photo I want to zero in on today is THE WATCHMAN, a landscape of a fin of eroded sandstone that sits on a precipice above the ocean along the Sonoma Coast. What I really like about the image is the layering of stone and rock in the image. Essentially, the photo has only a foreground and background w/ little or no middle ground. I also really like the fact that the THE WATCHMAN has more of a southwestern feel as far as the sandstone form, but is somehow perched above the ocean, rather than a sea of tumbleweed, sagebrush and shattered rubble. Upper Muley Twist Canyon meets the North Coast.

The key to the photo is the lighting though, and that is where our little story begins. I first stumbled on this fin in the winter, a few years ago. The Watchman is about a two mile hike out along the coast, and is in no way noted on maps. It was late afternoon, and I figured I would hang around until sunset to get a baseline image even though it was clear that as the light softened it would also strongly backlight the fin. Generally, silhouettes are not my cup of tea, so I had no illusions I was going to walk out of there with anything more successful than a postcard quality photo. However, it was clear from even from this test photo, that this was a significant place.

Accordingly, the next step was to go online and look at a sun position table for northern Sonoma County. The tables showed the positioning for northwest, front or side lighting in this area was July through early September. Now if you live in most of the U.S. this would be good news as summers are pretty clear or you may have some lingering thunderheads in the background late in the day. However in northern California, in coastal areas, it is commonly foggy all day or a substantial part of the day in the summer. Also, the daily weather maps cannot exactly pinpoint when and where the fog will be or burn off on a given day. It actually took six trips that summer up to Salt Point to finally get the photo I had in my mind's eye. By that time, it took me less than two minutes to get the photo, and then I quickly drove back to Guerneville to get some enchiladas at the Octagon for dinner.