The Steamboat Slough Bridge, shown here from underneath, was built in 1924. According to HistoricBridges.org, this bridge is a good example of a Strauss heel-trunnion bascule bridge. Despite some repair work in 1953 and again in 2000, the bridge is much like it always was.

Beneath Steamboat Slough Bridge © Harold Davis

Something of the same sort can be said for the Sacramento River delta. This is an area that time forgot, almost a foreign country in the backyard of the San Francisco metropolitan area, and adjacent to Sacramento, the California state capital.

Murmuration © Harold Davis

Driving the hour or so from my home in Berkeley to California Route 160, also known as River Road, which bisects the delta, my friend Jim and I weren’t sure what to expect. We found a vast low country, only a few feet above sea level, formerly wetlands and marsh, now ranch and agricultural land. Wind turbines and transmission towers sit astride the low-lying landscape. 

Two Towers © Harold Davis

The innumerable channels of the Sacramento River have created a maze of islands, with a reedy fringe on the banks and agriculture inland. Small roads cross the channel on bridges like the one across Steamboat Slough, or one of the many operational car ferries.

Real McCoy II (via iPhone) © Harold Davis

There are a few towns in the Sacramento delta, principally Ryde, Walnut Grove, and Locke, along with trailer parks and vineyards.

Wonder Bread (via iPhone) © Harold Davis

Ryde’s principle tourist attraction is Foster’s Bighorn—a bar and lunch place featuring hundreds of stuffed big game heads. They were really gracious about letting me photograph inside with my camera and tripod, but I really can’t bring myself to process any of the images. I also don’t see how one could really enjoy one’s brisket sandwich with the myriad glass eyes of lions, bears, and elephants staring at one.

Locke was a Chinese community, which swelled with seasonal agriculture hands who worked the delta. Today it seems to be an outing destination from Sacramento, with Chinese restaurants, a Chinese herbal medicine practitioner, and even the “Locke Ness: Things Old & Odd” curio museum and shop. Nearby Walnut Grove is the largest town in the area, and features grocery stores with ads from the 1950s (when was the last time you saw a loaf of Wonder Bread?).

There’s a sense of strangeness and otherness about the delta, and also, in a weird way, of permanence. This is country that makes you think that AI, fake news, and all the other stuff we think about every day, can only be the invention of some dissonant, alternative sci-fi future.

Threatening this permanence is the Delta Tunnel Plan. This hypothetical project, beloved by Governor Brown, and mired in innumerable law suits, would build two four-story tunnels under the delta to carry water from the delta to the Central Valley, and the always-thirsty cities of California’s arid south. 

Businesses of all sorts around the delta have anti-Tunnel Plan placards prominently displayed. Should the Tunnel Plan ever come to pass, it will drain the delta of the one resource it has in abundance—good, clean, flowing water—and change the land more than any other human action since the marshes were drained in the years following the great California gold rush. As with any project that projects changes of this magnitude, the downstream consequences—to the great Bay of San Francisco and beyond—are hard to know.

Here’s a photographic mystery for you! Can you reverse engineer these abstracts? As a hint, these were essentially created in the camera, with very minimal Photoshop processing in post-production (just a little cleaning up and enhancing colors slightly).

If you think you know how this series of abstracts was made, please comment with camera and lens, subject matter, lighting, and setup.

Abstract 1 © Harold Davis

Abstract 2 © Harold Davis

In downtown Palermo, Sicily, at the intersection of Via Maqueda and Via Vittorio Emanuele is an ornate and baroque piazza, surrounded by four symmetrical structures with statues in niches. Dubbed Quattro Canti—“Four Corners”—it is actually hard to give a sense of the overall ornamentation overload of the location. Often closed to vehicular traffic, usually with one or more street musicians performing, Quattro Canti was a fun place to hang out. I kept trying to pre-visualize how to make an image that captured both the over-the-top baroque ornamentation of the place along with the sense of place generated by the symmetry of the four buildings, but in practice none of my ideas really seemed to live up to the reality.

Correlation versus Causality © Harold Davis

This image consists of two photos. Both were taken from the center of Quattro Canti with my camera on the tripod, and both used my Nikkor 8-15mm fisheye lens. The outer image was made with the lens set to 15mm, so it is categorized as a rectangular fisheye. The inner image, which is repeated twice at different sizes, was photographed at 8mm, so it is a circular fisheye image. And, yes, LAB color inversions were used to create the final.

Regarding my title, Correlation versus Causality, I am mindful of a story about Picasso. Apparently, he hated giving his paintings titles, and thought they should speak for themselves. Sometimes his dealers forced him to come up with a title. He claimed to use the first thing that came to his mind, and enjoyed listening to critics hashing out the meanings of the titles he had given so heedlessly.

The badlands in this image are along the middle fork of the Kings River, photographed from a higher elevation. The point of this fairly abstract monochromatic composition is the contrast between the jagged shadows on the right and the comparable ridges in the folds of the mountainous land on the left.

Badlands © Harold Davis

I made my print of Badlands (sold thanks to Weston Gallery) on the wonderful, thick Moab Juniper Baryta Rag (it has the sensuous smell of a print from the chemical darkroom, and brings back those days in a Proustian sense when I give my print a sniff!).

I just made this large panoramic print of the High Sierra Crest on commission via Weston Gallery on Moab Paper Juniper Baryta Rag! The print is shown here curing, with our printer in the background.

Pano of the Sierra Crest Print “curing” © Harold Davis

On my way home from Palermo to San Francisco, I’ve had to change planes a couple of times, and am overnighting at Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) near Paris.

Travel is nice, but coming home is even better! I am looking forward very much to seeing Phyllis and the kids.

At CDG, I am staying at the Sheraton. This hotel is really a fun place to stay, and is an integral part of the airport, you walk here from the arrivals and to the departures area without going outdoors, and it is surrounded by runways and airport access roads. The sound proofing is perfect, and I can’t hear a whisper from all the activity out my windows.

Atrium, Sheraton Hotel at CDG © Harold Davis

The design of the hotel is shaped like a ship with a prow, or (more aptly) an airplane. The internal atrium has a glass floor, and I was surprised to note that you could see down with a view through a transparent ceiling (the floor of part of the atrium) into the train platforms for the RER into Paris.

The Sheraton at CDG is a fun place to stay, and reminds me a little of staying at the Tokyo Railway Station Hotel, as I did a few years back (particularly in the way you see all the little people scurrying like ants so far below!). But I also have a sense that this place was designed for the future, as the French powers-that-be envisioned the future 25 years ago. They got some things right, and some things wrong (they certainly didn’t envision needing outlets for charging multiple mobile devices)—and altogether the effect is somehow a bit quaint and endearing, as if Jules Verne had designed a hotel as a stationary twentieth century flying ship!