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Mount Tam
26 January 2023
That's what we call it around here. The full name is Mount Tamalpais and it's one of the three peaks in the Bay area. Mount Diablo to the east and Mount Hamilton to the south are the other two. Twin Peaks are just a couple of hills in comparison.
Mount Tam. Nikon D200 with 18-299mm Nikkor at 200mm (300mm equivalent), f5.6, 1/1250 second and ISO 200. Processed in Exposure 7 and Adobe Camera Raw.
But look north beyond the Golden Gate and there's Mount Tam. The Miwoks named it támal pájiṣ or western hill, which is a more accurate but less glamorous translation than the sleeping maiden.
We rendered it in a misty black-and-white for our Dec. 2019 story Tamalpais. There was a good deal of atmospheric haze in that picture.
Not so much in this one after three atmospheric rivers cleared the air.
We've been amused recently to read about the lines of tourists who patiently wait to take the same photo of some well known location, creating thousands of similar images. We see no harm in that. Everybody gets a piece.
We're more amused by our own propensity to return to the same places around here with the same cameras and lenses to shoot the same scenes over the years.
Are we daft?
In our defense, we confess to having been under the tutelage of a Jesuit who insisted on standing before Michelangelo's Moses (just to take one example) for a minimum of four hours. Just to take it in.
We tried it.
We can still see those horns coming out of Moses's head. But we can't recommend the practice. It merely fatigues. Your mind wanders. You start eavesdropping and wishing you knew more than one language. You wonder if it's been four hours yet.
Camera Raw Edit. Not happy with this, we started over in Exposure 7 before returning to Photoshop.
Still, there is something to be said for persistence of vision. For looking and for continuing to look. And to look again.
Is it ever the same scene?
Sure, Mount Tam is recognizable as Mount Tam in our images of Mount Tam. But the sky varies and with it the landscape. The shadows fall differently at different times of the year and hours of the day. The colors shift from green in the spring to golden in the fall.
You keep looking and you get a sense of place. You keep photographing and a story emerges. The passage of time. The arc of a life.
The difference, in short, between what endures and what passes away.