Photography Club of Davis
From the Bay Area "Stress-Garden" to Putah Creek: Davis Photographer to Show Northern California Landscapes
The Photography Club of Davis will host a free presentation of photography by Davis photographer Brett Chulada on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 7:10 p.m. in the Blanchard Room of the Davis Library, located at 314 E. 14th Street.
Chulada is a creative photographer specializing in landscape and nature photography, and his images center on the natural beauty of the various Northern California regions he has lived in and explored, from the Sonoma Coast to the Santa Cruz Mountains to the backroads and creek trails around his hometown of Davis.
For Chulada, the path to photography ran through a career reinvention. “My interest in photography began about a decade ago,” he said. In 2015, after 15 years in San Francisco chasing a dream of making it as a career musician while grinding as a waiter to support himself, he decided to leave it all behind. “I decided to drop everything and essentially fled the city altogether,” Chulada said.
His escape route ran through WWOOF, short for Worldwide Workers on Organic Farms, a program that places volunteers on independent farms and properties across Northern California and around the world. The program, he said, “ultimately plucked me from the stress-garden that is the Bay Area and planted me in the fresh fields of a converted dairy farm in Sonoma County.”
It was there, with new surroundings and time on his hands, that Chulada started documenting what he saw, first with an iPhone, teaching himself photo editing as he went. After two months in Penngrove, he landed on the Sonoma Coast, where he spent the next several years living and working on a 1,000-acre vineyard property north of Jenner, splitting his time between the tasting room and long stretches spent wandering the property or driving Highway 1.
Four years on the coast led him to the Santa Cruz Mountains and a stint in Carmel Valley before he returned to his hometown of Davis in 2024. It was in Santa Cruz that he picked up his first DSLR, though he says the camera he reaches for still depends on the moment. “Sometimes the iPhone camera still does a good job of it, depending on the circumstances,” he said. “I call it ‘big gun, little gun.’”
Since coming home to Davis, Chulada’s photography often leads him along Putah Creek, down the backroads of Yolo County and up into the Vaca Mountains, the latest chapters in a body of work built one region at a time. “I hope this presentation serves to provide an interesting visual summary of these regions,” he said, “as well as telling some of the stories of my experiences living in and photographing them.”
The event is free and open to the public, and all those interested in photography, nature or the beauty of Northern California are welcome to attend.
The Photography Club of Davis meets on the third Wednesday of the month, except in July and August. For more information, visit the club's website at photoclubofdavis.org.
"This event is not sponsored by Yolo County Library, and the presence of this group in the meeting room does not constitute Yolo County Library's endorsement of the policies or beliefs of this group."