Living in California we are used to green in the Springtime and brown grasses in the summer, so it’s not very often that we see the hills all white, carpeted with snow. This year the snow level dropped to 1500′ with enough accumulation to last for several days. After the storm we headed out to Los Baños Reservoir for a hike to Sharp Benchmark. Heading west from the end of the road, the Quien Sabe Range lay immediately ahead, a glistening white row of peaks on the horizon. In the foreground green grasses and wildflowers surrounded the reservoir, full now with the winter rains.
One of the constraints of photographing with an iPhone is the limited focal length of the lenses. My current iPhone XS Max has two lenses, wide angle and “not-so-wide” 2x zoom, so there’s little option for getting in real close to a distant landscape. As a result I’m pressed to rely on form, composition, texture and contrast. It’s a challenge, but at the same time it brings me back to the way the human eye normally sees a subject. And of course photography is never about the equipment, but the eye.