Tom Gamache News

• Sactown Magazine, Sacramento’s leading magazine Goes Coastal
• Gamache Images Complement CA Science Center's Latest Permanent Display
• Rangefinder Magazine finds rare 'Serenity' in 'Range on the Edge' book
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• ‘Wandering Around Outdoors’ Workshops adds Digital Boot camp
• California State Senate Contemporary Art Exhibition
• Mammoth Sized Corporate Art Installation Enhances Offices
• Gamache and Jaffe at The Los Angeles Times / UCLA Book Festival
• Joshua Tree National Park creates new park brochure
• Mountains Restoration Trust: Lois Ewan Trust
• IDS Real Estate Group - Architectural interior of the world's largest single story distribution center
• American Park Network trailer wrap commission
• Fox Studios wants the impossible ... and they get it
• Death Valley National Park Mural installed
• LA Times Review - "A love letter to the wild heart of Los Angeles"

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Sactown Magazine, Sacramento’s leading magazine Goes Coastal

This month's cover feature “Escape to the Coast” is a 14 page adventure featuring the “cool” California Coast as brought to light by well known western journalist Mathew Jaffe and outdoor photographer Tom Gamache at their together best – On the Road! In a story that stretches from Big Sur to Mendocino via fabled CA Routes 1 and 128, Jaffe and Gamache treat readers to the adventure and sights of an unforgettable summer road trip.

Gamache Images Complement CA Science Center's Latest Permanent Display

“ECOSYSTEMS” – The California Science Museum’s LA newest permanent display incorporates numerous Tom Gamache nature images into the “LA – Urban Ecosystems” interactive gallery displays. Selected from the Gamache authored book ‘RANGE ON THE EDGE – THE SANTA MONICA MOUNATINS’ from Angel City Press - the large format enlarged images help tell the story of LA’s urban nature experience.

“I’d like to thank the California Science Museums curator of ecology - Chuck Kopczak for the opportunity to both display many of my favorite images and assist the museum in explaining nature’s many mysteries and surprises”, Gamache commented. “It is a privilege to be associated with such a dedicated group of professionals and such an exciting and beautiful presentation”.

"The Santa Monica Mountains", written by Matthew Jaffe, photography by Tom Gamache, as reviewed by Jim Cornfield / Rangefinder Magazine. Rangefinder review...

      

Review - "As a resident of the suburban canyon system that borders the northern and northwest fringes of Los Angeles, I’m partial to this spectacular collection. It’s a visual and literary tribute to an important, but little known feature of this gigantic sprawl of a city. Range on the Edge gives us a rare and beautiful photographic portrait, and historical profile, of the rural Santa Monica Mountains. Lofty, undulating and wild, carpeted with tinder-dry chaparral scrub forest, the Santa Monicas and the arroyos that intersect them have a stern, but delicate beauty that requires the patience and sensitivity of a naturalist and photographer like Tom Gamache to capture. Fire is the natural centerpiece in the life cycle of this rare plant community, and every couple of years, large tracts burn off in spectacular, newsworthy conflagrations that illuminate night skies above this tangle of freeways and skyscrapers and neighborhoods, from Hollywood to the shores of coastal Malibu. Deep inside the natural infrastructure of the Santa Monicas, Gamache reveals a complex biosphere of rare serenity—sweeps of riparian meadowland, thick stands of oak and sycamore that filter shafts of morning light, and massive, prehistoric rock faces, whose heights disappear into low afternoon shrouds of ocean mist. This is the realm of coyotes and bobcats, mule deer, rabbits, squirrels, the titmouse and the red-tailed hawk. They are the true native Angelenos, occupants of an enormous natural resource, still known mostly to the rest of the world as home to the Hollywood Sign."

Mountains Restoration Trust interpretive panorama

Mountains Restoration Trust: The Lois Ewen Overlook - eight-foot outdoor interpretive panorama in conjunction with The Federal Trails Council, The Federal Recreation Trails Program, The State of California and the County of Los Angeles. A winter panorama by Tom Gamache of snow covered distant mountain ranges graces one of MRT's latest interpretive efforts in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Investment Development Services challenge

IDS Warehouse, Architectural Interior of Perris Distribution Center - Perris, CA

Investment Development Service Real Estate Group (IDS) recently announced a commission for Tom Gamache to create a single photograph capturing the interior of the new Perris Distribution Center (PDC) in Perris CA. Capturing the immensity of the PDC presented Gamache with one of his more interesting and challenging commissions. The PDC is thought to be among the worlds largest single story distribution centers covering in excess of 1,600,000 square feet with a circumference of over one mile. IDS has a long and successful working relationship with Gamache having begun working with him almost ten years ago imaging their many architectural projects in Southern California. In addition IDS presently owns and displays one the largest collections of Tom Gamache - California Landscape Art prints in their offices in downtown Los Angeles. 

Side of trailer "wrapped" in photographic image of Yellowstone Park

American Park Network trailer wrap commission

Tom Gamache was commissioned by American Park Network (APN), for whom he has supplied visuals for their many "National Park Books" for many years, to create oversized images of National Park Landscape locales to 'wrap' both sides of their touring "Photography Workshop" trailer. The seventeen-foot long by five-foot high mammoth images feature Yellowstone National Park's Hayden Valley and its buffalo herd on one side, and a large scale view of Yosemite Valley's Half Dome, including Nevada Falls and the High Sierra, on the other side.

Both high resolution images were from Tom's extensive file of National Park images taken over the last 25 years. Tom was assisted in the preparation of the images by Brian and Michael Shore of Total Graphics in Agoura Hills, CA. Brian can be contacted at brian@totalgraphicsus.com.

Fox Studios wants the impossible ... and they get it

Century City, CA - IDS Real Estate Group, one of California's leading real estate service companies, commissioned Tom Gamache to photograph a twilight view of one of their newest properties - Fox Building #103 at the corner of Avenue of the Stars and Pico Blvd. in Century City.

click image to enlarge

Gamache said "Shooting the building to meet the client's expectation was a challenge. They wanted a twilight view to match the project's original artist rendering. The elevation and perspective depicted in the rendering was not achievable. I shot the building during one of Southern California's beautiful twilights - from 20 ft. off the ground. Nature cooperated and gave us a stunning, purple sky which complimented the beautifully designed and illuminated building."

The image is currently being used in IDS's promotional materials as well as in a mammoth sized print which is on display in both the IDS Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles and in the lobby of the Fox Building.

Among the largest single piece panoramas in the national parks

One of the largest single piece murals in the national park system has been installed in the Death Valley National Park Visitor Center. Tom Gamache was commissioned by the park to create an overpowering and lasting image of the park's stark beauty on a grand scale. The 23 feet wide panoramic image depicts the entire world famous Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes. More...

Death Valley National Park Photographic Mural

LA Times Review - "A love letter to the wild heart of Los Angeles"

"The Santa Monica Mountains", written by Matthew Jaffe, photography by Tom Gamache, was recently published by Angel City Press. Los Angeles Times review...

Summary - "The Santa Monica Mountains" is an ambitious book, as sprawling, quirky and varied as the range itself. More than a coffee table book and just short of a travel guide, it's nothing less than a love letter to the wild heart of Los Angeles. Rock and water, fen and glen, red-tailed hawks vying for a meal, every imaginable kind of light — Gamache's lens captures it all. In a particularly stunning shot — at dawn or dusk, it's hard to tell — your eye takes in a steeply tilted landscape. There's the gnarled old tree, a frizz of short, dry grass, then the sudden shock of seeing a coyote calmly staring into the lens, into your eyes, bold and not at all afraid.”

 January 14, 2007- LA TIMES BOOK REVIEW
by Veronique de Turenne

In the book's coastal section, we see the searing reds and golds of sunset and feel the cool drift of silvery fog. Turn a few pages and the same palette of colors plays out in wind-driven wildfire and pillars of billowing smoke The Santa Monica Mountains are the only range that transverses a major metropolitan city in North America, slicing Los Angeles and defining it, shaping its hills and its valleys, its canyons and its ocean front.

The Santa Monicas are undeniably a range on the edge of the world, welcoming the Pacific into its rocky ridges, almost daring the ocean waves to break at its foothills. The mountains are dotted with mountain lions, bobcats and mule deer, rock singers, movie stars and writers, lilies, oaks and steelhead trout, bikers, hikers and grizzled peaks that seem to kiss the sky.

Along the course of its forty-six-mile span, the range encompasses Dodger Stadium, Griffith Park, Laurel and Coldwater canyons, Hollywood, the Hollywood Sign, Beverly Hills, the Getty Museum, Pacific Palisades and Malibu, to name only a few points of iconic interest. And these are mountains that have gone uncelebrated, until now in The Santa Monica Mountains: Range on the Edge, a com-pelling history and commentary by award-winning writer Matthew Jaffe, punctuated with 140 breathtaking photographic pictures captured by renowned landscape art photographer Tom Gamache.

This is the definitive biography lovers of the Santa Monica Mountains have been waiting for, the story of a magnificent range on the edge of America's edgiest city. Available through Angel City Press and Barnes & Noble.

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