Aerial vantage

by Jim Zuckerman

I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of pictures in my career, and every once in a while I forget about one of them. It doesn’t happen often because my visual memory is pretty acute. Just this morning, however, I ran across this picture I took from a cliff high above the Southern California coast on the peninsula of Palos Verdes. I had forgotten all about it – it turned up at the bottom of a cabinet drawer. I remember hearing on the news that there was going to be a gathering of tall ships in Los Angeles, so on that Sunday I drove to the point where viewing was supposed to be very good. Every time one of the spectacular tall ships came into the harbor, an armada of pleasure boats accompanied it. It was a dazzling sight, especially from an elevated point of view. There is nothing like aerial photography – or at least photography from an elevated vantage – to add drama to an already dramatic situation.