A Perfect Santa Barbara Moment

I was out walking when I looked over and saw it.

A cowboy sitting alone on a rail overlooking the Pacific. A vintage Mercedes convertible parked behind him. One impossibly tall palm tree stretching into a sky full of clouds.

It was almost too perfectly California to be real.

So, of course, I took a photograph.

Later, I turned the image black and white, and something changed. Without the color, it stopped looking like a photograph I had taken that afternoon and started looking like something I might have found in an old box of photographs - California at some indeterminate point in time.

It could have been 1965.
It could have been yesterday.

That may be what I love most about California. Every once in a while, the present slips away and you catch a glimpse of the mythology of the place.

The Pacific. The palm trees. Beautiful vintage classic cars. Cowboys somehow finding their way to the coast. That peculiar combination of glamour and loneliness that California has always done so well.

Nothing in the photograph was arranged. The man didn't know I was taking it. The Mercedes just happened to be parked there. The palm tree had probably been standing there for decades.

For a few seconds, everything simply landed in exactly the right place.

And I happened to notice.

I've spent much of my life working in design, where we're constantly moving things around - editing, styling, composing, trying to create the feeling we're after.

But sometimes the best composition requires absolutely nothing from us.

Life styles the shot.

Our only job is to recognize it.

— Maison D