Notes To My Mother

  I have titled the above image "The Window".  It was taken from a dirt road on the way to Buttermilk Boulders east of Bishop.  Bishop is out of sight below the horizon in the middle of the image.  The distant mountains are the White Mountains to the East of Bishop.  This is illustrative of how the storm was all around bishop with Bishop remaining in sunshine. Bishop Ponds were especially attractive in the late afternoon light as the sages seemed to glow. The early morning light in Pleasant Valley with the storm seeming to clear.  For the time being. 30 miles north of this 395 was still closed due to the storm.  This is a popular trout fishing area blessed by the Owens River.

There is nothing quite like being with the night for several hours uninterrupted, alone and with no artificial light. When I was shooting stars at 11,000 feet in the White Mountains I stood looking up from sundown to around 3 am. It was exhilarating. At that altitude you see the stars with such clarity and there are so many of them! It is simply awesome. In fact, there were so many stars and they were so bright I could walk around in the dark without a flashlight. When the night got dark enough I turned on my camera and pointed it in the direction I had been gazing for the past hour or so. I set the camera to expose for about 30 seconds. In that amount of time the camera’s sensor picks up considerably more light from the stars than I can see with the naked eye. This is a picture taken looking toward the southern horizon where the center of the Milky Way can be found in the constellation Sagittarius. Look at the tremendous number of stars! These kinds of images are best c...

Why “Notes to My Mother”? My mother was the one person in my life who was always interested in what I was doing, what I had to say, who I was. She was never too busy to listen and take an interest. Never critical, always accepting. Even when I was wrong or misguided, there would still be a gentle interested listener present. Though she has been gone over 6 years, I still get the urge to write or call her, to share an image I am proud of or share my latest adventure to some beautiful place. I know she would love to hear about it. My mother was an artist. She painted most of her life, right up to her passing at the age of 96. When I was 4 years old we lived on the east side of the Sierra Nevada Range. She would take me out to paint with her - she with her easel, me with mine - and we would sit together creating our art. While I gave up on the medium she kept at it. Then, in the year she passed I picked up a digital camera and began my adventure into the world of landscape ph...