Those of you that are subscribers probably know that I have been away for the past month in Santa Rosa, California. Living in a rented cottage in the hills about 20 minutes from town I have tasted the experience of living in the country and watched the light come up each morning in this very beautiful part of the world. Often I've been here at the end of the day when the sun goes down and fades away in a final blaze of glory. 

From the deck of the cottage where I am staying  just after the sun came up.

And across the valley at dawn on a rainy and foggy morning.

And just before sunset.

My point isn't so much the pictures I've made here where I've been living, although I've enjoyed making them and am glad I have them. It is that I have been able to have this experience, to revel in the sheer luxury of waking up each morning to the challenge of "what do I do today?" and "where do I go to photograph?" 

Can you imagine? No TV, no phone, some internet so that I can post these blogs, high up on a ridge overlooking a valley and hills on either side, a dog named Din that comes over every morning from the neighbors to say hi, and the biggest problem I've got is do I go to the coast or inland up into the hills and mountains behind me to photograph. Yes, this is the luxury of retirement and affordability, yes it will come to an end and when home there will be chores, errands, hassles, things I have to do but don't want to do (April 15 is approaching, for instance), but I have had this time, this month, in which I could indulge a lifelong passion to see and to see with a camera in hand. 

Today, for instance I am confronted with the choice of heading down the 101 to the last exit before the Golden Gate Bridge to photograph again at the "headlands". Why? Let me show you:

I made this picture across the parking lot from where you stop to walk through the WW II bunker to get a view of the bridge from above. There is a raindrop blurring the image in the lower right. Could I fake this and remove it in PS? Probably. But it would be better if I was there again standing in front of this very strange rock mound  in no rain.

Or, do I head back to the coast again today to shoot more Tafoni? What? Tafoni? Yes. Italian for "weird rock formations", pretty much. Thanks to a  friend's tip about the State Park at Salt Point I found these:

OMG! Amazing, yes? As I am in my last few days I'd better stop writing and get moving as the light is coming up, it is gray out but not raining and I've got places to go, clearly.

I don't know if this life I am leading is the reward for a career that was at times hard work or not but it sure is a very good thing. I am thankful for my lucky stars.

Okay, I can hear you now:  "Enough already with the skate parks!" but I really do have to add something to the one already posted, the Healdsburg Skate Park.

I found another one, this one a much more typical skate park. A more typical one combines all those wonderful concrete curves, hills and valley, dips and things to jump over, with, you guessed it: graffiti.

In this case young artistic expression run amok. Total chaos in an orgiastic display of colors and design by spray cans used without restraint. So cool.

What I loved most about this place, besides its sheer exuberance, was how the paint totally subverted the form lying underneath. In some of the pictures, you can't really tell what the underlying shape is.

As I worked around the park and the afternoon wore on I could see that back light was going to play a role:

like the broad back of some sea monster lying in the sun:

I can hear it coming, you saying a few months from now: "Yeah, Rantoul lost it that winter he went out to California and started shooting skate parks. He got so into it, it was all he was talking about. And the pictures? Totally whacked. You know, no one's heard from him since? I bet he's still out there shooting those parks. Poor guy."

When I posted the Healdsburg blog (Skate Park) a friend wrote back and said "Wheat Fields!"meaning that the way I was seeing these was very much the way in which I photograph the wheat fields in Washington (Wheat 2011). I have used form to make content, used shape to denote space, used pattern for emphasis, used tonality and color to convey emotion, used light to deepen and used repetition of forms to deny and reinforce spatial relationships for a very long time and do not plan on stopping any time soon. 

Do you think I'm finished with these, think we can now move on? Not bloody likely as I'm on a roll and having way too much fun.  BTW: this one is in a park in Santa Rosa on Fulton Street right across from the high school.

Awesome!

You know, you do this as long as I have and you think: the last thing anyone needs is another picture by Neal Rantoul. You go off for a month in the winter to an area that is pleasant and warmer than home in February and you slip into a lifestyle not so different than when you are home. You've got to eat, sleep, work out, shop, pay some bills, do errands. People wish you well on your vacation but it's not really a vacation is it? Yes, you do all those everyday things and some touristy things too but you are driving and looking, on the hunt for pictures, to make "work", wherever and however you can. What a disease.

A few days ago was like that. I drove up the valley a ways to pick up a prescription and in heading out of the town Healdsburg came across a skatepark. This makes sense as Healdsburg is very affluent and would want to provide for its youth and perhaps divert them from skate boarding in other places.

Here we go:

I was the only one there. It was bright and sunny at about 10 am. For a while I just sat there looking at it, trying to figure out if I could do it. Was this a series? Was it just going to be just a few pictures? Was it nothing? Was it something? I figured it  wasn't going to be anything unless I worked at it. So I started photographing it.

I had a really wonderful time photographing this over the next couple of hours. As the sun got higher the shadows changed and became shorter.  This was one of the times where "it" didn't matter much. It was what I did to "it" that did matter.

I wonder if these connect with you, the reader of this mostly daily blog. If you were reading this a year ago you observed me struggling with trying to make pictures in San Diego and it wasn't going so well. This trip, this time, is going better. I am not trying to force pictures out of it so much as working to try to do the best with the opportunities presented to me.There seem to be many.

Whether these are something worth anything you and I won't really know until I get back home and start to work through them making them into prints. Right now at about 7 inches across on my laptop screen they look good. I see them as letting go of detail in the blacks, a classic altering of Zone III shadows down into Zone II's and I's. Not hard to do with histogram sliders in Aperture or Lightroom. You can see I am playing with color as well. Aaron Siskind taught us in graduate school that working with negative space could be meaningful and substantive. He used his stonewall pictures from Martha's Vineyard as examples but he could just as easily shown us the divers in NY.

I can remember asking students to talk about new work they were showing in class. Often they would not know much more than we did, the ones seeing the prints for the first time. Why? Because the photographer very often doesn't know much about what they've photographed, often they've made a picture of it to find out more about it. How can someone know all about something at 1/250 of a second? They can't. This felt like that the other day shooting frame after frame in this empty sunlit skatepark in Healdsburg , CA. Starting in I knew nothing about what I was doing. I was going down a path of learning about it and my abilities with it as I was doing it. I am still learning about it as I present it here in this post to you. 

While driving that day I was listening to Alexandre Desplat's soundtrack to the movie The Tree of Life, a simply remarkable piece of music. It clearly predisposed me to dig below the surface. 

Something? Nothing? We will see.

Thanks for looking.

I drove out to the tip of Bodega Bay yesterday, about an hour from where I am staying in Santa Rosa. This is classic California coastline: rocky, with cliffs, crashing waves below, dramatic sunbeams sending light down on the ocean spread out in a display that is always dramatic and beautiful. 

From the parking lot I could see a man photographing with a view camera, pointing not out at the horizon but back in at the eroded sand at the top of a cliff above the ocean. Standard operating procedure:  dark cloth over your head (his was red for some reason), long moments making adjustments, getting the camera set to frame the picture the way you want, out from under the cloth, take light meter reading from meter hanging around neck, stand to side of camera and set lens, close it down so no light is coming through it, cock the shutter, insert film holder, pull slide out, turn to look at thing being photographed, sometimes wait for light to be right or to change, sometimes wait for something to get out of the frame or to come into the frame, trip the shutter, return the slide, but flip it so black side side faces out so you know it has been exposed, pull out film holder and move on to next photograph.

This guy was taking all those steps, so it looked like he knew what he was doing. This isn't something you just pick up, by the way, it takes years to get fluid and to work intuitively with a big camera like this. I couldn't be sure but I think he was hauling around an 8 x 10, just as I did for over twenty years.  This isn't the biggest as there are wooden Deardorff 11 x 14 cameras and even a 12 x 20, but they are excptionally rare. For anyone somewhat sane 8 x 10 is about the limit. 

This above from the Deardorff website.

As I stood there, leaning up against my rented car in the parking lot, watching him work, I felt both a sense of kinship with him, as I'd done what he was doing for so very long and a feeling of complete relief that I was not working this way any longer. 

When I started working in 8 x 10 in the early eighties, if you wanted the highest quality there was really no other choice. It was a view camera, perhaps 4 x 5 but preferably 8 x 10. Some people (this included me in the early years) just made 8 x 10 inch contact prints. Now, of course, we have many options. You can see what this guy on the cliff in Bodega Bay chose. I am sure, had we spoken, he would reference the beauty of the silver gelatin print, how digital intercedes, gets in the way of the image, imposes its own look to the final picture. I've heard all that before.

I don't buy it, however, and believe most of the negative reactions people have to digitally sourced photographs comes from looking at bad ones, of which there are a huge number.

Was I making these photographs of this view camera photographer on the cliff at Bodega Bay in California yesterday afternoon with a film camera? Did I have to process the film, set up my darkroom with trays of chemicals, place these negatives in the enlarger and make the prints and dry the prints to see these as positives on a contact sheet or as enlargements? I did not.

This post will continue and finish a description of the aerial pictures I made in California in February, 2014.

The first ones are: here

As we flew back from the foothills on the wastern side of the Sacramento River Valley we were flying with the sun in front of us. This meant whatever I photographed would be more reflective and more back lit:

I really liked the way the farmers would leave the natural path of the streams and ponds and plant right around them.

This being February, there wasn't much growth yet. This gave me a palette of browns, yellows and pale light greens to work with.

As a kid I used to make drawings with a ruler and a straight edge on white mat board my mom would get me. These above two reminded me of those.

According to Les, the pilot, the farmers flood the rice fields in the winter, not so much to protect the crops but to attract migrating ducks for hunters to shoot.

And finally, we flew through some more tree farms, with the trees almost bare limbed but with pink and blue buds blooming and dropping their petals on the ground below:

If you're looking at these on a smart phone, shame on you. They are bad enough on the 13 inch laptop screen I use when I travel. What you and I need to see is these as prints because that is a treat no man or woman should miss in their lifetime (LOL).

Seriously, the aerials in particular come to life when printed. How can you see that? Well, first I have to print them when I get home, which I will do, then I have to work to get them shown, which I usually do, or invite you to my studio to see them, which I sometimes do. Tell you what, you respond with an email telling me you want to see them and if I get enough responses I will pull together another open studio night and invite you. Not local, live in China or Australia? What a great excuse to plan a trip.