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Wild Blue

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The clouds are rolling in. The sun is crossing the sky quicker, the autumn stillness is settling over California, and the leaves are starting to turn. Temperatures are dropping, rain is making it into the forecast, and the weather is receding from the casual predictability of summer during the transition into the next phase of Earth orbit around sol. It's sunset season again.

I figured that my last image, Nescience's Coda, would be the last heavy hitter, at least until the next Winter and Spring time. I had found myself too busy to consciously engage in a consistent stream of photographs, and as of recent, found myself submitting more drawings, colorings, and digital works in place. I even found myself yearning to go back to fractals, because they're fun, easy, and potent crowd pleasers granted you aren't Jak, who feels that anything created with numeric inputs and button clicking isn't impressive in the least.

I reflect upon my own start over a year ago. I mainly had a camera just for the sake of capturing bits of humor when around friends. I still have a movie where one guy boxes another guy while on a pogo stick, and wins valiantly. Yet my first step into actual photography began one November evening in 2004 when I bore witness to the most beautiful sunset that could ever be captured. That felt so long ago. I had no composition ability, no digital postwork knowledge, and I still had very little clue as to how to properly use my photo. Yet to this day, I still consider that session, which I call the Ascension session, to be my best. I only wonder if I had the power to step back to that November evening, just where I would take it, and how differently I would have done it. I know I have made long strides in devloping stronger photography, where even though I still stubbornly insist on sticking to sunsets, I'm working more towards subject matter.

While returning to Dockweiler beach, an expanse I call The Wastelands, I pulled into a parking spot hoping that the sky would unfold like it did during Ascension. It was a hope against hopes, as it was the first time in my life to see such a display, and it's the same unconscious prayer that graces my mind before starting every session. The clouds were flat, narrow, and high. No such luck. A tick haze along the horizon also muffled the spectacles far in the distance of the Malibu hills. While it wasn't the ideal conditions, they were exactly what I wanted considering I was in The Wastelands.

What is it really? The beach where Imperial Boulevard hits Ocean View at the Hyperion Water Treatment plant is the only bit of action on Dockweiler. I drive past this every now and then when afternoon traffic is hectic. Sometimes, later at night, I'll see the dull orange glows of the fire pits, and the slim silhouettes of people sitting around the fire; a lone orange dot surrounded by an inky expanse of pitch black. There are old beach houses, long abandoned, as well as the remaining skeletons of a restaurant called The Shack, its walls all fenced off and covered in decades of graffitti. The bike path runs through it, but is empty for the most part with exception to the occassional biker making the long haul between Manhattan Beach and Marina Del Rey.

Driving Southbound, the beach is only a short distance from the road on the right. There's nothing but a curb, a steep ivy embankment, a 30 foot drop, a narrow strip of concrete, and then beach sand at the foot. To the left, rolling brown hills secluded with a tall barbed wire fence. It was to be an ambitious housing project. You can see streets traversing the hills, sidewalks, and even utility boxes for traffic lights, but after many decades of neglect, these streets have become an urban-locked ghost town. What happened, you may ask? It's now a reserve for an endangered butterfly.

So the whole three miles between Playa Del Rey and El Segundo, this Dockweiler Beach, is really nothing at all. It's still the same beach, nothing wrong with it, it's just an unregarded strip of land that falls under the flight paths of departing airplanes from LAX.
Image size
810x1109px 285.28 KB
© 2005 - 2024 vest
Comments5
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sendecanatorj's avatar
this picture goes well while listening to coldplay's 'in my place'

this picture is the perfect representation of the last afternoon of summer, the fact that it's california just adds to the whole summer concluding itself

+favourite