A Photograph On Occasion by Dave Wyman
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Sierra Nevada Eastside
Album-2021-01-19-2229
Foggy Night in Los Angeles
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Trek Émonda
Yosemite's Natural Fire Fall
Had Camera, Did Travel - 2015 in Review
Italy by Bike 2015
The Wildflower Century - Chico, California, 2015
Getting High on Haleakala
A Photograph On Occasion
Yosemite, Selected Images, 2014
Route 66 - 2015
Navajo Country - 2014
A Ride Up Stelvio Pass, Italy
The Un-Yellowstone/Teton Photography Tour, 2013
Clover Avenue Elementary School
The Swingin' 60s - An Eyewitness Account
Homage Galleries
It's Hip to Be Square
Indian Country Galleries
Holiday Festivals of Los Angeles
The Mother Road - The Route 66 Galleries
California Galleries
Mountain Home - Photography Amongst the Giant Sequ
The Oregon Galleries
An August Ascent of Mt. Sill
The Tidelands of South Carolina
Yellowstone Country - Autumn, 2007
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Sierra Nevada East Side - Autumn, 2006
Zion, Bryce and Las Vegas - A Photography Tour
Death Valley Haikus - Winter, 2007
Yosemite in Winter - 2007
Emigrant Highways - San Joaquin Valley, California
The Glory of Yosemite - Spring, 2007
Winter in Yosemite - 2008
Death Valley 2008
Yellowstone Country - Autumn, 2008
Mono Lake, Bodie Ghost Town and Autumn Colors - Si
Autumn in Yosemite, 2008
Route 66, California - Barstow to Amboy - 2008
Route 66 - Barstow to Amboy, California - 2009
San Diego Natural History Museum - Death Valley -
Land of Fire and Ice - The Cascades and Northern C
Return to Steinbeck Country
Point Reyes National Seashore, California - Previe
Rapha Continental -The Navajo Nation Ride
Beyond the Snapshot: The Point Reyes Peninsula
Yellowstone Country 2009
Yosemite in Autumn - October, 2009
Sierra Nevada East Side - 2009
Indian Country and the Southwestern United States
The Southwest - Canyon Lands and Indian Country, 2
The Mother Road - Route 66, 2010
Family Camping Trip Galleries
The Fargo Street Hill Climb, Version 2010
California's Gold Rush Country
Yosemite's Waterworks, Spring, 2010
The Central Coast of California - 2010
Mule Pack to the High Sierra
Point Reyes, Tomales Bay, Petaluma - 2010
Sierra Nevada East Side - 2010
Winter in Yosemite - 2011
IPhonic Imagery
Death Valley - Spring, 2011
En Plein Air: The Central Coast of California
Steinbeck Country 2011
City of Angels - Photojournalism
Oregon Photo Tour/Ken Rockwell Homage - 2012
Some of my favorite photographs are here, many of them made on the photography workshops and tours I conduct.
I've spent a few days exploring the bluffs above Pacific Coast Highway, trying to find some of the unique ways an iPhone - or any camera in a cell phone - can envision the world. That vision includes capturing amazing beams of light and plenty of depth of field. I think those attributes were put to good use in this photo. I've discovered the ability to capture these rays of light, and to make them go where I want them to as they stream across a landscape depends on the angle of the sun. Success can... 
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also depend, at least in the case of the iPhone, on whether the camera is in the vertical or horizontal position. There's one more important element that can work for and against the photographer who wants to include these special beams of light. That element is time. It goes by quickly at the beginning and the end of the day. That's when the beams are easiest to see and photograph. But time early and late in the day seems to slip quickly away, and the beams slip away, too.
I recently pedaled my bike to the top of a paved road in Malibu, California, above the Pacific Ocean. I made a photo with the camera in my cell phone. I've discovered the tiny lens in the camera is good at seeing what I can't with my eyes: bright beams of light that peek out from the corners and edges of things, like trees and clouds and boulders. I decided to incorporate one of the beams into this photograph.. I'm sure some people will see these light rays as distractions. I think of them as another... 
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way to experience reality, similar to the way wide-angle and telephoto lenses change our view of the world. Now that I know they're waiting for me and my cell phone camera to find them, I'm on the lookout for these magical manifestations of electro-magnetism.
Using the burst mode on my iPhone let me make 22 images, from take-off to landing, of an acrobatic young man. He made his amazing leaps look as easy as taking a nap. Actually, he made about a dozen leaps and this is one of my favorite photos of the dozens I made.
Haleakala Crater - Island of Maui, Hawaii Each day the world renews itself at sunrise. Nowhere is that more apparent than 10,000 feet above sea level at the summit of massive Haleakala, known as "House of the Sun" to Hawaiians. I brought a fine camera with me to document the new day. However, I was lucky enough to make this image, with its unexplained bolt of light, with my cell phone. The photograph has come to mean more to me than a photo of dawn. I think of it like life itself, which contains for each of us periods of light and dark and which can take us up to high summits as well as send us into deep valleys.
The Hollywood Reservoir is less than ten minutes from Hollywood Blvd. Yet it's and unknown by most Angelenos. On a Sunday visit, I had about 2 seconds to raise my camera to my eye, find and focus on the ducks, and press the shutter.
A night vantage point offered me a view of the Southern California coastline. Many attributes define as as human. We can make tools, we are self-aware, we have language. Surely we are also human because of our ability to enjoy a beautiful sunset.
Sometimes it's quiet beneath the 6th Street Bridge, just east of downtown Los Angeles. Sometimes there are people just hanging around, with nothing better to do than climb the lampposts and watch themselves, as a drone records their derring-do. That was the case a few days ago when two of us brought our cameras with us to see what was up – literally – below the bridge. I like this photo. Exposure and composition had to be made on the fly, so to speak. The look is monumentally urban, and the... 
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scene calls to mind King Kong atop the Empire State Building. (Actually, we'd happened upon a video shoot.) By the way, if you'd like a private tour of Los Angeles with me for a few hours or a day, or to join me on my next scheduled tour of the city, contact me.
Photographed on a bike ride after I'd pedaled up several hundred feet above the Pacific Ocean, in the hills of Malibu, Southern California.
A great pyrenees leads a herd of sheep along Highway 395, along the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.
The meaning of a photograph can be obvious to me before I press the shutter release. Here is the meaning I gleaned after, rather than before, I made this photograph: Aren't our lives like these leaves? Aren't we often, and perhaps always, balanced on the brink of falling into the unknown? Life, whether as complex as that of a human being, or something as simple as a leaf, is changeable, and in the scheme of things, emphemeral.

When I made this photograph, my camera was balanced on the... 
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railing of a foot bridge. The leaves in this photograph achieved temporary equilibrium on the edge of the dam at the base of the amazing Sycamore Pool. Filled year-round by the waters of Big Chico Creek, Sycamore Pool is an enormous, concrete, municipal swimming pool in the town of Chico, California. To me, Chico is paradise lost.

I'm not sure anyone else noticed these leaves; they probably caught my attention because I've seen leaves balanced like these on other occasions, in other places. This is the fir
Photographed in Orinda, California.
Mount Diablo stands as an isolated, 3,849-foot (1,173 m) landmark, visible from much of the San Francisco Bay Area. On the day I made my trip to the summit, the view was impressive, although distant landmarks, such as Mt. Lassen, in the Cascade Mountains, and Half Dome, in Yosemite, were not visible.

I'm not sure why some humans - myself among them on occasion - enjoy "conquering" the summits of important mountains. I'm a little sorry, too, that a paved road winds its way to the top of Mt.... 
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Diablo. While the old visitor center on the summit is impressive, it would not be so without the accompanying view.

Considered, like many imposing mountains, to be a sacred place, Mt. Diablo has served in Native America mythology as a seat of creation. Perhaps making the journey in my little pick-up truck (with my pbase friend - Rosemarie ), rather than on foot or on my bike, made for a more mundane visit. Certainly I enjoyed the view, which here looks sou
When I was a child I thought being alone was the equivalent of being lonely. Yet there is a difference between enforced and voluntary isolation.

Mike, whom I met as darkness fell over the city of Portland, does not fear being by himself, nor does he mind a lack of companionship. With his life stripped down almost to the essentials, he carries all that he owns on his back. His one luxury appeared to be a mini-boom box.

When we met, Mike was listening to the radio. "Do you know this... 
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song?" he asked with a smile. I did (in fact it has a rather special meaning for me.) As he headed into the night, his bedroll on his back, I did not know if Mike embraced the lyrics of the song or turned his back to them.

"Desparado"

Desperado,
Oh you ain't getting no younger.
Your pain and your hunger,
They're driving you home.
And freedom, oh freedom.
Well that's just some people talking.
Your prison is walking through this world all alone.
An annoyed crow dive bombs an unsuspecting eagle, in a residential neighborhood in Astoria, Oregon.
When a clammer spots a hole, or "dimple" in the sand, she or he will utilize a three-foot long piece of four inch diameter PVC pipe, capped with a handle, to help capture a clam. The trick is to then position the pipe over the top of the dimple and begin pushing the pipe deep into the sand. Placing a thumb over the tiny exhaust hole drilled into the top of the pipe creates suction on the trapped sand and water below. Pulling upward brings a column of beach sand trapped in the tube.

Removing a thumb from exhaust port allows the sand to fall free. With luck, a shiny brown clam shell will be extracted from the sand.
Sometimes we come to an understanding of something by a bit of indirection. Sometimes what we think we see is merely an illusion.

This is the "Maranantha," shown in reflection - and flipped upside down - while docked in Depoe Bay, Oregon.
A large anemone, firmly attached to the glass, is illuminated by a shaft of sunlight.
Many of the 1930's era bridges in the state of Oregon, USA, are triumphs of architecture. That includes the undersides of this bridge, which to me resembles a Medieval cathedral.
I've been lucky enough to fly a few times - no, not with my arms flapping, rather on jets and small planes. For me there has always been that transitional, magic moment as the aircraft roars down the runway and begins to rise on a cushion of air, that magic moment when the battle with gravity seems won, when all things seem possible.

I made this photograph on the beach, at sunset, in Bandon, Oregon. I wonder what the seagull was thinking as it made that change from a somewhat awkward web-walker to an athletic acrobatic of the skies.
Harbor seals are hauled out on the rocks on one of the Oregon Islands, and children spend a few minutes in play. Soon, darkness will descend over the Islands and the nearby town of Bandon.
Making friends with this equine was easy. Making him pose for his portrait proved difficult.
We arrived at the falls, which are in the Columbia River Gorge, east of Portland, Oregon, early on a Sunday morning. For a while we had the roaring falls all to ourselves.

I made a similar photograph last year on my trip to Oregon, which is in another pbase gallery. Repeating the set-up for this photograph, which meant waling up to and down from the empty bridge a couple of times, was enjoyable. My thanks to Hal Grant, who waited patiently and positioned me - wich hand signals - on the bridge.
A California sea otter, wrapped in kelp to keep from drifting too far from nearby friends similarly draped in seaweeed, lies in a bed of his own making on an early Sunday afternoon, near the mouth of Morro Bay, California.

Do you ever wonder about your own life, how well you've anchored yourself to the familiar, and what might happen if you let yourself drift away from your world? Unlike the human species, sea otters seem to be able to have their cake (or at least a clam, oyster, sea urchin or... 
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abalone) and eat it, too. They
stay put with ease when they want for as long as they wish, rolling over a few times with a strand of kelp clamped in their teeth until they've made a blanket of seaweed. Then, when the mood and hunger strikes, they can swim for miles to hunt for shellfish below the rolling waves of the open sea or in quiet coves along the central coast of California.
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