Steve Gould

Unless you have, say, a majestic oak in your front yard, it wouldn’t be completely inaccurate to say that San Diego in the fall isn’t exactly as colorful as, say, places the Pacific Northwest and the Northeastern U.S.

Our cover artist, nature photographer Steve Gould (www.stevegouldphotography.com), knows this all too well.
For 23 years, he was a chemistry professor at Oregon State University and the University of Connecticut before moving to San Diego in 2002.

But even if the closest thing we have to falling leaves are large palm tree branches laying out in the middle of the road, Gould says he has no trouble finding inspiration here.

"I've lived four times in the Northeast and four times on the West Coast," Gould says. "I've been a Californian at heart since I was 11, and San Diego is the best of urban California. While we do lose some color diversity here during the summer and fall, until the rains—hopefully—come, there's still a lot of color here with all the tropical plantings throughout the area." 

This is a big compliment coming from Gould, who retired a little more than five years ago and has been devoting himself fulltime to what he calls his photographic “life after life” ever since. He’s been all over the world, from Canada and Tanzania to the urban environs of Europe and the untouched beauty of the Galapagos Islands. He’s safaried in Kenya and dived with whale sharks off the coast of Wolf Island, all to get some amazing shots, many of which he’s shown at places like the Gotthelf Gallery and The Ink Spot and in solo shows at Gallery 21 in Balboa Park and the Del Mar Art Center.

For this week’s cover of CityBeat, we chose Gould’s “Canna Fantasy 1” to illustrate our annual Fall Arts issue.

"While most of my images are single photographs, the one on the cover is actually a montage from two photographs of different members of the canna [plant] family,” Gould says. “I used some digital magic in Adobe Photoshop to combine them. The technique blends the two so you can see shadows of some leaves and parts of other leaves from one image coming through leaves from the second image. The technique also blends the colors, so what you see is somewhat different than the colors of the original plants.”

If you don’t see Gould diving off the shores of San Diego, you can check out his work at the upcoming La Jolla Art and Wine Festival on Oct. 10 and 11 (www.lajollaartandwinefestival.com).

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