Three Mountains in the Garden
California poppies, lupines, coreopsis and lacy phacelia spread through the foreground before the landscape rises through a middle ridge toward three distant mountain forms. The elongated 6×17 cm frame connects these layers into a single composition, moving from intimate foreground detail through the middle distance and into the faraway vista.
While walking through this landscape, there was a peaceful quietness about it. I hoped that combining the basic elements of close foreground, middle distance and faraway vista would create a compelling image with a kind of Zen-like balance.
California poppies, lupines, coreopsis and lacy phacelia fill the landscape. The panoramic frame contains details that are difficult to see in an online image—from individual flowers in the foreground to an isolated group of car-sized boulders sitting on top of the middle mountain.
Those same boulders appear again from another perspective nine years later in the 35mm photograph Cloud Shadows at the Top of Gorman . Photographed in 2010, the later image shows the same group of boulders from a different position and at a very different moment in the history of the Gorman landscape.