Here’s Planet Bubble! My photograph has won a ribbon! 4th place in the Color Waterscapes Category, at the annual International Photographic Exposition at the San Diego County Fair. Normally I don’t name photographs but titles are required when submitting to this competition. And for once, a title came easily. So I thought you might like to know a little more about the picture and just why, for once, a title worked or at least made sense to me.

The “planet” idea stems from that halo around the big bubble, reminiscent of Saturn’s rings, even as the bubble floats in water and its apparent roundness is an illusion caused by its reflection on the surface. Other bubbles follow behind and the floating islands of foam in the foreground create an impression of surrounding clouds.

In the moment of taking the picture, however, I didn’t plan on this somewhat “other worldly” impression. But I’ll take it! For this is no image of any planet or outer space.

Or perhaps it’s outer space of another kind. I took the picture this past January when visiting California’s Anza Borrego Desert State Park, and the town where it’s located, Borrego Springs: a vast natural area of a wildly different climate and atmosphere from my daily urban life. As always, I went with photographic purposes: a return to a favorite desiccated ocotillo skeleton, as well as ocotillo branches and their sculptural arches. Also, many grand rocks, the soothe of palo verde trees, also the magnificence of tamarisks, and the many kinds of cactus. And whatever else appeared to me, shadows, creatures, maybe.

Yet I was also going to an oasis, staying several nights at a resort whose grounds are designed as a restful, eye-pleasing refuge. Every time I go, I wander this desert garden with its meandering pathways and planned mini-river which flows lazily, offering seductive visions of reflected palms. The river ends in a roundish pool, surrounded by a rock border, also trees and plants; in its middle is a circular frame of two dozen water jets —birthplace of the bubbles and swirling foam patterns on the surface.

I love to photograph water, in all the manifestations I can possibly find; I also wondered if perhaps the bubble show were an anomaly which I might not find on my next visit. Compared with the rest of the grounds, the display seemed outsize, extravagant: all that foam, those dozens upon dozens of bubbles! Over the four days of our stay, I kept revisiting and working, kept being drawn as to an upwelling source of some kind, a spring of, well, magic.

Of my hundred or so images of the pool, Planet Bubble stands out as the best in my “show.” And here are two more images from the pool . . . perhaps you’d like to supply your own titles. What do you find in Planet Bubble and/or these others? Let me know your thoughts . . .