This 2019 rephotography takes a second look at the hill neighborhoods destroyed by the Oakland Firestorm of 1991. View the series here.

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A couple of months after 2018’s Camp Fire, I visited the town of Paradise, California –site of one of California’s deadliest fires. View the series here.

This series looks at the post-fire landscape of Santa Rosa’s 2017 Tubbs Fire. Having lived through the 1991 Oakland Firestorm, I found distant memories resurfacing.

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This sequence of a rare Super Blue Blood Snow Moon was taken on January 31, 2018 between 5:00AM and 6:40AM as the moon was setting at dawn. A super moon is the name given to a full moon occurring at the closest point to the earth in the lunar orbit. On the occasion when there are two full moons in a calendar month, the second is called a blue moon. A blood moon refers to the optical effect during a lunar eclipse, where only the red spectrum of light, filtered by the earth’s atmosphere, illuminates the lunar surface. A snow moon is a full moon that occurs during February, the middle of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

Instinctively we are drawn to the grandeur of nature. Of the California redwoods, John Steinbeck wrote, “The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.”

Before California became a state, schooners entering San Francisco Bay navigated by the old growth redwoods on the Oakland hills – nearly 20 miles distant. Today those old growth forests are gone, carted away along with their root systems for the early economic growth of the West Coast. The remaining transitioning forests are dense and woody and inhabited by tall, thin trees. Less than five percent of California’s ancient old growth redwood forests remain.

Driving north from my home in Oakland, through the backroads in search of the ancient temperate rainforests, I came to realize that we had not only extracted the trees, but the wilderness, as well. This was now a landscape of our own construct. The parks, largely on bottomlands where the largest trees grow, were surrounded by vast areas being logged. These sanctuaries were bisected by picnic sites, parking lots, campgrounds, and highways – the trees on exhibit behind auto glass.

It was only on the trails that I discovered the forests of the Yurok, Tolowa, Karok, Chilula, and Wiyot. Away from the pavement, the trees wide and tall were spaced apart in majestic stands, their tops obscured by distance. The understory of huckleberry, rhododendron, and waist-high ferns, glowed in the filtered light.

As a photographer, I am enticed back down the trail to the “construct.” There I find evidence of our beliefs, priorities, and our culture’s perception of our place in nature.

View Old Growth »»

Alamere Falls. Point Reyes National Seashore. California.

This work is part of my ongoing fascination with Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. My photography there covers all areas of the park and is part of my larger examination of the California Coast.

For information on this image, including archival print purchase, contact me with the title of this post.

Registered © Thomas Bachand. All Rights Reserved.

Pinnacle. Scupture Beach. Point Reyes National Seashore, California.

This work is part of my ongoing fascination with Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. My photography there covers all areas of the park and is part of my larger examination of the California Coast.

For information on this image, including archival print purchase, contact me with the title of this post.

Registered © Thomas Bachand. All Rights Reserved.

Sky Trail. Point Reyes National Seashore. California.

This work is part of my ongoing fascination with Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. My photography there covers all areas of the park and is part of my larger examination of the California Coast.

For information on this image, including archival print purchase, contact me with the title of this post.

Registered © Thomas Bachand. All Rights Reserved.

Rock Outcropping. Point Reyes National Seashore. California.

This work is part of my ongoing fascination with Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. My photography there covers all areas of the park and is part of my larger examination of the California Coast.

For information on this image, including archival print purchase, contact me with the title of this post.

Registered © Thomas Bachand. All Rights Reserved.

Tangle. Point Reyes National Seashore. California.

This work is part of my ongoing fascination with Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. My photography there covers all areas of the park and is part of my larger examination of the California Coast.

For information on this image, including archival print purchase, contact me with the title of this post.

Registered © Thomas Bachand. All Rights Reserved.