Selected Works Selected Works

Morning Four

A coxed four working through early mist on Lexington Reservoir — at the gateway to the Santa Cruz Mountains, Los Gatos, California — in January. The mist was dense enough to eliminate the far bank entirely and to reduce the four rowers and their shell to a single dark horizontal against white and grey. The cold was considerable. The reservoir was steaming.

The image was shot from the bank with a long lens. The rowers were perhaps forty metres away and moving at approximately fifteen kilometres per hour. There was one frame in the sequence that worked — this one, in which the four silhouettes are distinct and the shell is level and the oars are in the mid-stroke position. The others are slightly wrong in ways that are difficult to name but immediately apparent.