Last week, I showed you two of my four photos currently running in the Ocean’s Edge show at Marina Square Gallery. At the top of this article is the third, Morning Light, which I took at the Morro Bay marina late last winter.
The name of the photo is a bit of an inside joke. Any local person looking at it would immediately recognize — given that Morro Bay faces westward to the ocean — that the picture was actually taken after sundown. The title comes, of course, from the name of the boat in the foreground, which would no doubt already be out on its fishing rounds if it were indeed crepuscular morning.
There are, conservatively, several billion extant photos of Morro Bay marina in pretty much every lighting condition, especially sundown. What makes me particularly happy with this one, and what I think distinguishes it from most others, is that it is taken from a different viewpoint, throwing the foreground boats into a more interesting relation to the Rock and the causeway.
The last of my photos from Ocean’s Edge is this one, titled Castle Point Lighthouse:
Savvy longtime residents and visitors to the Central Coast will see this and immediately recognize that they have no idea where the hell this is. Unless they’ve also visited the north island of New Zealand.
I got this photo back in 2020, when Carol and I were in the Antipodes visiting her brother Graham, and his friend Jacky Challis. As it happens, not long after this photo was taken, Carol and I were stranded in New Zealand for the better part of the year while Covid kept the country locked down and international flights were nearly nil.
Poor us, right? The truth is that we were overjoyed to be stuck in that beautiful country, staying first in Jacky’s gorgeous home in Waikanae, and then in Graham’s brand-new place in Otaki. God knows how they put up with us all that time, but our gratitude was (and is) boundless.
Speaking of Jacky, who is a brilliant and award-winning photographer, I should mention that the composition of this photo was shamelessly lifted from a very similar one of hers after she discovered this vantage point to the lighthouse.
Anyway, the name of the gallery show, Ocean’s Edge, doesn’t technically dictate a particular ocean or a specific edge. When any of the souvenir-hunting tourists visiting the Marina Square gallery want to know where they can find this lighthouse, I plan to just tell them “it’s a ways up the coast.”
It’s not a lie if I don’t specify which coast.
Ronald Crittenden 