By Clyde Noel
 Photo by Joe Hu, Town Crier |
Town Crier Correspondent
BusinessProfile
While Mathias Van Hesemans was flying as a helicopter mechanic in Vietnam in 1967, he bought a camera at the post exchange and then took a correspondence course on how to use it.
Last week, 35 years after he first learned how to use a Nikon FTN camera, he opened a landscape photography gallery at 127 Main St.
“What impressed me in Vietnam was the devastation and the huge craters we made when we bombed the landscape,” Van Hesemans said. “Then, flying over the coastline, with the white beaches and simple lines, I began to see nature and its beauty.”
After returning to the United States, the St. Francis High School graduate attended Foothill College, took three photography classes and received his associate degree in photography from De Anza College in 1972.
In the early 1970s, he worked as an instructor and teaching assistant at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite National Park. He continued to develop his skills by studying the landscape photography of Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock and Brett Weston.
“I was so overwhelmed at the workshop, because they were expressing their feelings through photography,” Van Hesemans said. “It’s there I learned the solid techniques of photography.”
Bullock taught him mystery, Adams taught him grandeur and technique, and Weston taught him abstraction. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in photography from San Francisco State University in 1975, Van Hesemans traveled to Hawaii to study volcanoes.
Although he has many photographs of the Hawaiian volcanoes, his most memorable photographs are of Mount St. Helens in Washington. Many of these photos are on display in his gallery. Through aerial views, views from inside the crater and close-ups of lava flows, Van Hesemans captures the larger-than-life drama of volcanoes.
His works also encompass other majestic and magical landscapes: Crater Lake National Park, Denali National Park in Alaska, Death Valley National Park, Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, and Yosemite National Park.
A visit to the gallery reveals Van Hesemans’ skilled use of light in downed trees that look like toothpicks, a smoking lava dome and sunlight emerging through 800-foot plumes of ash and smoke.
Van Hesemans has served as contributing editor for Photographic Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle’s section on nature photography. He has had more than 150 photographs published in various books and magazines.
“I would like people to come in and share their knowledge of photography and adventure,” Van Hesemans said.
Mathias Van Hesemans Photography is located at 127 Main St., Los Altos. Summer hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday and Thursday; and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday.
For more information, call 917-1432.
