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.

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.

After being in Santa Rosa for about a week, I took a chance and pushed east over a couple of mountain ranges down into the very flat Sacramento River Valley. This is where the majority of agriculture is in California and it is an extensively managed engine of capitalism and a large part of the state's economy.

I ended up in Yuba City for a night. Towns in the valley exist as support for farming, for the most part, and Yuba is no exception.  I decided to try flying over the valley  as there was potential for pictures in the grids of the fields that ran off to the horizon. At the first small airstrip I tried outside of Calusa the pilot was fine about taking me up but it was going to be in the front seat of a crop duster two winged plane. Having a wing below you when photographing is not so good, plus being out in the open meant there would be buffeting of the camera and the resulting images wouldn't be sharp. I thanked him but declined. In the Yuba airport I found a pilot with his own Cessna 182 who was happy to take me up.

The 182 is about perfect for photography. It is larger than what I am most used to, the Cessna 172. It can fly faster, has more room inside and is very stable. My pilot, Les Sander, was experienced, careful and thorough.  We took off at 10 the following morning and it was clear and calm. Les had asked what I was up to, why I wanted to go up to photograph, and I said that I was an artist and was doing this on my own nickel. He looked surprised but said nothing. Right away we were in some wonderful stuff:

This is a region where they grow a lot of rice and also fruit for dried fruit. The cherry trees were in bloom and a faint pink color:

Just west of where we took off, there lies a low range of hills called Sutter Butte, sticking up out of the flat valley floor like a raisin on a breadboard, an eroded butte from eons ago and the only thing higher than a two story building for miles around:

(Thank you Google Earth)

On the way across the valley headed west we circled it on the northern edge:

Leaving Sutter Butte behind us we flew across the valley floor at about 1500 feet at 135 mph.

Then headed for the foothills along the western edge of the valley.

Les had to fly the plane higher to be able to get over these hills and so he took it up to about 3000 feet. Know how you get a single engined small plane higher? You fly it in circles with the stick pulled back a little until you're at the altitude you need. Takes a while.

Next up, in California Aerials 2, I will chronicle the flight back to Yuba City. It'll be good. 

Along the way Les asked on the intercom through our headsets as we flew along if I was  going to use the pictures I was making to paint from and what did my paintings look like. I had confused him by telling him I was an artist. I explained that no, I was a photographic artist and that I would make prints of the pictures I was making and show them in exhibitions in galleries and museums, maybe. He said, "Really?" 

I said yes, that was usually what happened. 

Next up: California Aerials 2

If you've been reading this for awhile you know this is a recurring theme here at NealRantoul.com. The idea of things staying the same but being different too.

Well, we are going there again, but this time in relation to where I now am in Santa Rosa, CA for the next three weeks and how I keep photographing this one tree that sits outside the back door of the cottage I am renting high up on a ridge that is just simply gorgeous every morning when the sun comes up.

I think we're all familiar with this scenario:  aging artist, confined to a rocking chair or perhaps stumbling around using a cane, sits in same spot each day and, pastels in hand, sketches the same tree through the times of day or different seasons. At least in my mind this fantasy results in a mature career artist making fairly quick and gestural responses that encapsulate all the years of experience he/she has into these series of pastels, or charcoals or pen and ink drawings.

Well, photography can do that too. I am not infirmed or confined to a rocker, do not use a cane but I am old and as I sat at the table in the  cottage last week, writing  the posts on Fred Sommer as the sun came up, or it got lighter, I would look up to see this black oak tree right in front of me:

Sometimes it was shrouded in fog, as above, sometimes crystalline clear:

And often with fog yet to burn off in the valley below:

or bathed in sunlight later in the day as the sun headed down:

I think I've got it figured out now. I set up the camera on the tripod the night before I go to bed and it's ready to go the next morning as every day is some new and wonderful light show.

Why the comments about the senior artist? Because I think of this as a way to work that is all about the subtle things inherent in long observation of the same thing as it's being altered by light and atmosphere and time of day and maybe the seasons. This kind of keen observation results in imagery that is about the differences between the frames. Are those attributes you associate with a young artist? I don't. 

Next up: The Same but Different in Iceland