What?

 Tafoni? Sounds Italian.

 What is it? Some kind of ice cream? 

I know, a shape of pasta, right? Like Anelli or Bucatini.

Well, no: actually it is rock.

Wikepedia has a very nice description and definition here:

Tafoni (singular: tafone) are small cave-like features found in granular rock such as sandstone, granite, and sandy-limestone with rounded entrances and smooth concave walls, often connected, adjacent, and/or networked. They often occur in groups that can riddle a hillside, cliff, or other rock formation. They can be found in all climate types, but are most abundant in intertidal areas and semi-arid and ariddeserts. Currently favored explanations controlling their formation include salt weathering, differential cementation, structural variation inpermeability, wetting-drying, and freezing-thawing cycles, variability in lithology, case hardening and core softening, and/or micro-climate changes and variation (i.e. moisture availability). Tafoni have also been called fretting, stonelace, stone lattice, honeycomb weathering, and alveolar weathering.

with a lovely photograph of just where I was two weeks ago:

Salt Point Park along the coast north of Jenner, CA

I was in northern California for the past month photographing. What follows is some of the pictures I made while there.

I posted some of these before (here) but the series has taken on larger proportions as I have been printing them.

So, I'll include more here:

These are from from the second trip out there. Salt Point was about 1 1/2 hours from where I was staying and the weather is very different along the coast so it is was difficult to tell if I'd get there in good enough weather to photograph. I did.

This time I used a shorter lens and would  hover over these shapes and forms as though from a plane and found the sandstone was taking on the shapes of body forms; odd, eroded through time, wind and water.

This almost seemed outside of my control, seeing shapes that were filled with character and personality, as though I was an anthropologist or archeologist at a dig looking at unearthed human and animal evidence from a past age. 

But perhaps from another planet too as some of the organic shapes were not from ours. I don't know that I'd had an experience quite like it while photographing. I'd had the feeling before of  being so immersed in what I was doing that where I was was no longer important. I'd also had the experience of shutting out of everything else around me . 

That was considerable as this was going on at my back:

I hope you enjoy these. If you do, let me know, as few people like working in a vacuum. Neal's email