Swirled Sheet Metal: Near Baker, CA

For an instant, this small piece of a destroyed cargo container looked every bit like the bottom of the ocean.  The water, the current, the barnacles on rocks, the swirling reeds, the living dark sandy bottom.  As I walked along the ocean floor, weightless and slow, I kicked up debris, and they rained down around me like spent sparks from a fire.

The surface of the metal even felt like a barnacle-covered tide pool rock.  I photographed it at an angle that made the shapes seem to flex and relax, tumble and flow with deep waves begun under other continents.  I like the intangible sense of space in this photograph: blindness in murky water.  There don't seem to be any fish.

Swirled Sheet Metal: Near Baker, CA, 2008