Project 02 · LAKE ALMANOR
Where the forest meets the water.
Lake Almanor · Northern California
Aerial · Film · Landscape Documentation
The landscape
A place understood through its edges.
Lake Almanor is shaped by transitions. Forest gives way to shoreline, open grassland meets stands of pine, and wetlands create quieter boundaries between land and water.
Documenting the area became less about any single view and more about following those changes – observing how the landscape opens, closes, and reveals the lake from one environment to the next.
Through the trees
The lake appears in pieces.
From within the forest, the water is rarely revealed all at once. It appears between trunks, beyond the slope, and through openings in the canopy – glimpses that gradually give way to the scale of the lake beyond.
In Motion.
Following the landscape.
Still images hold individual moments in the landscape. Film allows those relationships to unfold – moving through wetland, forest, shoreline, and open water as one connected place.
Landscape Film · 01:16
A continuous aerial study of Lake Almanor, following the landscape from enclosed forest and shoreline to the broader scale of the lake.
Forest to Water · 00:36
Moving through the forest canopy toward open water, the transition reveals the lake gradually – from a distant presence beyond the trees to the landscape beyond them.
Landscape Studies
Smaller movements within the whole.
Short studies isolate individual transitions within the larger landscape – wildlife moving through wetland, grassland opening toward water and the forest edge tracing the shoreline.
Marsh to Lake · 00:23
Along the Edge · 00:20
Above the grassland · 00:20
The Landscape as subject
Not every story begins with a structure.
Lake Almanor became an exercise in documenting place without asking architecture to be the subject. The story emerged instead through transitions – wetland to forest, forest to shoreline, and glimpses of water opening into the larger lake.
The result is a study of landscape as something experienced through movement, scale, wildlife, and the changing relationship between land and water.