The Arnold, Ca. area is in a pine forest just seven miles South of Big Trees National Park, on HWY 4. Twenty minutes walk from our vacation house in Arnold gets me to our HOA lake called Fly in Acres Reservoir.
Recently more than ever, my son and I have been working on our relationship and starting to accept that both of us have been wanting to be the best dad and son for each other rest of our lives, but somehow we have lost our ways and are still treading water in square one.
The winding streets to the “lake” and surrounding areas are stunningly beautiful specially in early Fall where White Dogwood trees everywhere are in their full pastel pink and peach colors.
I spend later part of the summer to late fall in Arnold with my son, who was staying up there. We would walk down to the lake with our our dog Shadow, swim to a few docks, rest up and walk back to the house. We would talk if the mood was right, Erik would make dinner being an excellent cook specially for his age. We would eat, sometimes watch a movie and go to bed.
One day around mid Fall, we had some discussions in the afternoon that didn’t get us anywhere. Later on Erik asked me if I wanted to walk down to the lake and stretch out. I wasn’t really in the mood for it, so I said I might walk down later with my camera and see if I could amuse myself for an hour or so.
I got to the shallow end of the lake pretty late in the evening where he was. We greeted and talked for a bit, then he walked off and sat on a titled tree trunk further away. I started to scan cross the lake with my 500mm lens, where some of the trees were starting to change color near the shore and their reflections on the water looked promising enough to play around and experiment.
The more I narrowed down the area I wanted to shoot, the more interesting and dynamic it became specially with fading daylight. There was absolutely no way I could capture exactly what I had in mind in a full frame, so I went for a larger area and hoped that I can harvest the frame I want out of it.
I played with it when editing, trying to bring out the colors and shapes that I was after, and suppressing the shades that I didn’t want to see. This picture started to come to life very slowly, but when I finally saw it, I had to stare at it for a while as if it had slowly risen to surface form the bottom of the lake.
I packed up and left shortly after taking few more shots not knowing if I had anything worthwhile. But during the session, the thoughts of my failures for not being the best dad and a best friend for my son were constantly present. I found the experience to be very soothing and matched how I felt at the time.