For many years I have walked the trails of Seal Point Park in San Mateo, most often arriving in the late afternoon and staying long after sunset if the conditions feel promising and I cannot leave the remaining photographs behind.
I climb the hill trails for the clouds and go down to the shoreline for the waves and the birds.
Along the edge of the Bay, aquatic birds spend the last light of day probing the soft mud for small crustaceans. When they finish feeding, they move farther out toward the low tide flats where they can safely roost. Coyotes and feral cats can only venture a few steps onto the mud. The birds know it.
My attention, however, often belongs to the pelicans.
In late afternoon they glide just above the water, barely a foot off the surface, landing along the shoreline to groom and settle for the night. They meticulously repair their flight feathers one at a time. Sometimes they appear to argue about their day, beaks open and pouches swaying as if in conversation. Watching them, I often thought about how my children’s bedtime routines were never nearly as careful as those of the pelicans.
I am still learning their habits. Now I dress warm, bring a long lens, and wait near their flight paths and favored landing strips.
Seal Point Park was also Shadow’s park. I passed it on my way to a downtown coffee shop nearly every afternoon, and she would tremble with anticipation as we approached the entrance. Ignoring her pleading eyes was impossible. While I photographed, she would sit beside my feet, eventually leaning against them — welcome warmth on cold evenings. I suspect her understanding of these photographs was entirely different from mine, and from yours.
During early spring and fall, the final fifteen minutes before darkness transform the Bay. The last sunlight paints the sky in pale peach, pink, blue, and subtle violets. The water grows still, and between slow ripples the surface becomes a mirror. The reflected colors shift and blend as the waves approach the shore, like a vast moving kaleidoscope. The moment lasts only seconds; most of the wave images are made then.
Many photographs are fragments of a much larger scene. I scan the sky and shoreline for shapes and color relationships, then isolate smaller compositions within the whole and slowly pan across them, capturing overlapping frames. Often I do not fully understand what I have photographed until the editing process reveals unexpected forms, tones, or even a distant reflected subject that completes the image.
Occasionally the best photograph is behind me. One evening I turned around to find low clouds I had never noticed, and their quiet simplicity became its own series.
The editing process is not about imposing an idea but about uncovering one. Each photograph gradually settles into the color or black-and-white space where it belongs. My role is simply to follow the path the image reveals and stop when it feels resolved.
Every viewer will interpret the photographs differently. I only happen to be the first person to witness their beginning — from the moment of capture, through layers of editing, to the final image.
Copyright © Ara Michaelian, #MultiMediaAra, All Rights Reserved.