Del Monte Forest
2012.07.15
Day Seventy One. There's a parking lot (if you care to give it that much credit ... it's really a dirt patch roughly 15 cars wide) on the side of 68 that I pass every day on the way to school. I've looked at it for nearly a year now and finally decided that it needed to be explored. I'd checked the satellite imagery on Google Maps and didn't see a whole lot more then relatively solid tree covering, so I wasn't really expecting a whole lot. But, it was a lazy Sunday afternoon and I was happy enough to be out of the house with my hiking boots and camera. After getting out there, opening the aperture up as wide as it would go and taking a few shots, I really felt like I was getting back to the kind of shooting I really enjoy. It hadn't dawned on me, but I'd done a bunch of crazy shoots over the past few months, and it felt really good to get back into a nice, normal forest and hunt for cool stuff to shoot. For the past few months, I'd found myself in settings where I wanted to take 10 more shots with every step I took. It was actually kind of stressful, now that I stop and think about it. I wasn't actively thinking it at the time, but I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to accurately capture all of the beauty that was surrounding me. It was really relaxing to be in a normal forest, where the trees just looked like trees; I could walk half a mile, not take a shot, and not worry about it; and, more importantly, get excited when I found something interesting to shoot. Coming up with an awesome set from San Fran, Carmel's Scenic Rd, or the Santa Cruz Boardwalk isn't really a challenge. There's so much interesting stuff at those places, anyone with a point-and-shoot could do them justice ... but coming up with an interesting set from a perfectly normal forest, now that's the kind of challenge I enjoy. I was the only one (that I saw) in the forest that day with a camera. I even got asked why I was taking a picture of "that" ... I really can't help buy smile when people ask why I'm taking a picture of something. It reminds me that there is an art to this, that not everyone sees what I see, and that it's for my love of sharing what I see that I do all of this. :)
