July 06, 2010 - 10:28 AM

The Story Behind the Shot

Title: "Nepenthe at Garrapata" (Nepenthe is a Spanish word meaning "no sorrow")

Location: Garrapata State Park, Big Sur Coastline of California

Welcome!  I am instituting a new type of posting.  Every once in a while, I'm going to tell you a story about how a particular shot was acquired, "The Story Behind the Shot".  I have some crazy fun, adventurous, and sometimes humorous experiences you will enjoy. I've been encouraged to share.  I want to give you a more textured vicarious experience, a few lively steps beyond the tacit implications of the visual composition.

In this blog venue, the stories will be brief.  If I can't tell it to you in two minutes or less, I'm not doing my job!  Here goes:

“I really hope we don’t have to come back this way!”  My intrepid girlfriend Adele had just scrambled up a particularly precarious slippery tangle of roots & mud on our way to a brutally steep ascent.  The promise was of incredible fields of wildflowers on rolling slopes high above the Big Sur coastline of California.  We would watch the sunset, take some shots, then hike back the longer, more gradual descent back to the car; in the dark, with headlamps.

It wasn’t working.  The trail was is very bad shape through the Redwood forest, poorly marked and it gradually petered out to a faint trace into the fern draped shadows.  Hopes and our stalled momentum hung in the humid understory.

Standing still for a moment in the late hour, brought the inevitable smart conclusion to turn around, hike back down the gnarly slopes and hope we didn’t slip. Many places had a high probability of a fall, and a fall would probably result in a broken arm or ankle as you took a rude and rollicking ride into the rocky creek below.  Going forward had all the feel of pushing your luck too far.  

My hopes of one final shooting hike were grandiose.  I had saved the best and hardest hike for last, and now all I had hopes for was getting us both back to the car safely.  The salt in the wound was a lost opportunity for one last incredible shot.

Thanks to hiking poles for added balance and stability, (I call them sissy sticks no more - great hiking assets!), we made it back to the car safely, and in time to make one last dash of a hike to the coastline.  A frantic search and heart pounding pace led us to this particular vantage point.  The light had great character, and the balance of compositional elements held promise.  As it turns out, this may have been one of the best landscape shots of the trip!

My dashed expectations have often led to a nadir in attitude, but often those same unforeseen circumstances have lead me to opportunities I could never have imagined.  We never gave up, kept moving forward and found what may have been a better shot than we could have found on the top of that elusive ridge.  Dinner tasted really good that night!