Photographer Jon McCormack captures nature’s spinning, spiraling patterns

The seashore can also be the place Jon McCormack developed a brand new appreciation for nature’s patterns and their hidden meanings. A famend photographer, conservationist, and vice chairman of digital camera and photograph software program at Apple, McCormack and his spouse moved to California in the course of the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, looking for solace and shelter. Every night, he visited Asilomar State Beach, digital camera in tow, the place he was drawn to nature’s “quiet harmonies,” as he calls them. “The thing that really struck me as fascinating were these little moments in time where you have a combination of tide, light, and rock that creates these transient patterns,” he says. “That was far more interesting than the rest of the grandeur of the beach. I’ve always been very interested in the environment. This moved me to be a photographer primarily interested in the pattern and structure of the natural world.”

Looking by his archives, he found that nature’s patterns had guided his compositions for years, even when he hadn’t totally realized it. Now, he wished to {photograph} them intentionally and discover the parallels between them. Sometimes that meant visiting a neighbor’s yard to look at the petals of a hibiscus in bloom or studying methods to {photograph} miniscule, jewel-like plankton by a microscope. Other instances he ventured so far as the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard to seize the ethereal fantastic thing about ice caves. The result’s a brand new ebook, Patterns: Art of the Natural World, which showcases intriguing kinds at each scale, from microorganisms to mountain ranges. Punctuating the gallery of beautiful photographs are a number of brief meditative essays by esteemed thinkers and writers, together with biologist David George Haskell, and National Geographic Explorers Wade Davis and Sylvia Earle.