Recent snaps focus on abstraction.

I don’t know how these things happen, but now and then my photography hits an abstract streak, much as it did during my recent sojourn in Carmel-by-the-Sea, that prettiest of California’s seaside towns. Maybe it’s just a reaction to all that hard striving retail shopping all around.

On guard. Thinking of Saul Leiter.

Self portrait – I’m shielding my eyes from the bright sun ….

Stairs

Carmel pines

Snapping away

The bride

Fake landscape

Painted painting

All snapped on the G1, mostly in Carmel’s alleyways which, the local guide book informs me, has no fewer than 42 such passageways!

Almost gone.

Wander down to Fishermen’s Wharf in Monterey and you will be inundated with plaques, street names and quotes from seemingly the only famous person ever to have lived there, John Steinbeck. However, once you reach the fabled Fishermen’s Wharf of which he wrote so passionately, you are confronted with the very worst of modern taste. T shirt vendors, popcorn sellers and awful mass market restaurants so devoid of originality that you want to run for cover.

Yet, creep down a narrow alleyway or two and you can still get a feel for what Steinbeck was writing about.

Steinbeck’s dove. G1, 33mm, f/6.3, 1/2000, ISO 100

Wharf’s edge. G1, 41mm, f/6.3, 1/2000, ISO 100

Gull. G1, 45mm, f/6.3, 1/1000, ISO 100

A reality check.

I have a passionate aversion to vacations, regarding them as a time when you look into the distance and do nothing useful. So when chance found me on the Monterey peninsula at the start of the week I wasn’t about to let the opportunity go to waste by sitting idly on the beach.

Instead, I did something I last tried some ten years earlier, plonking down $9.25 at the gate to take the 17 Mile Drive around Pebble Beach, of golf and classic car show fame. It’s seventeen miles of the most beautiful views and coastline on earth, true, but I couldn’t but help thinking about the insane economics of living there. The nuttiness of the whole thing is perhaps best exemplified by what is possibly the most photographed object in the world, the Lone Cypress on 17 Mile Drive, near the Carmel Gate.

Obligatory snap of The Lone Cypress.
5D, 200mm, ISO 250

Now you should know that the 17 Mile Drive is home to some of the priciest real estate on earth, never more so than for the three or four estates which actually have a view of the tree. I would guess that the cost of these is $20mm each, one even going so far as to post a plaque grandly stating ‘Lone Cypress View’ at its gate. Now with opportunity cost at a modest 5% and property taxes and maintenance added, annual cost of this little abode is in the region of $1.5mm after tax, what with all the gardeners and servants required. Or $3mm pre-tax.

It gets worse. You see, 17 Mile Drive is socked in with heavy fog for three months in the summer, being on a peninsula jutting out into the Pacific, and for three more months in the winter it’s raining and awful. But catch it on a spring day or, as I did, a late autumn one and, truly, it is heaven on earth. That’s if you can get around the tour buses and crowds. So for your $3mm, you get to enjoy the Lone Cypress for 6 months of the year. Which, without a doubt, makes it the Costliest Tree in the World.

Some other views along the Drive:

Bird Rock, replete with seals, sea lions, pelicans and cormorants.
5D, 200mm, ISO 250

Spyglass golf course, with deer.
5D, 400mm, monopod, ISO 250

A firm vision.

Depending on your view of the world, this is either nirvana or hell. I tend to the latter, but it still makes for a jolly display. I would imagine the clerks in this store go bonkers every now and then and start thinking homicidal thoughts. You can have too much order ….

Belt store display. G1, 33mm, f/5.6, 1/60, ISO 800