Clear spring days are a time when the weather of the east and west coasts unites for a perfect 60ºF and a brilliant sunset. On those days, I could look out from Berkeley Lab and see the Farallones far off shore.
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Swiss Army City
New York has something for everyone (perhaps even the nature lover in Central Park); it feels at times like a Swiss Army knife of a city. When I took this panorama originally, it was so large that it didn’t fit well as a single image. Collapsing the picture to a “tiny planet” stereographic projection, the image now looks literally like those images of a Swiss Army knife, opened to show all of its different components.
C’est Ici L’Empire de la Mort
The Paris Catacombs are a story of multigenerational effects: the mining of limestone for Paris’s characteristic buildings, the collapses of buildings into the voids the mining created, the efforts to reinforce the cavities, and ultimately the decades-long project to transfer the remains of six million Parisians to the space. At this point, it has earned the name “Empire of the Dead”.
Notre Dame Avant le Feu
So many people have a connection to Notre Dame, and in the hours after the fire was announced, it seemed like everyone had their personal Notre Dame picture to show. The number of visitors explains the ubiquity: 30,000 people per day, 13,000,000 per year. That explains why the crowds in this picture, even on a rainy night in late November.
Pink Dogwood
You know spring has arrived when the pink dogwoods in the neighborhood finally bloom.
Enter the Clock Face
From a catacombs’ portal to one with a bit more life: the back side of this clock face at the Musée d’Orsay is apparently (from the cell phone screen in the foreground) the perfect location for a social media moment. In the window, the view across the river to the classiest parts of Paris provides the right counterpoint.
Umbrella Annulus
This is a big week for images of annular objects and I want to make my contribution from a less cutting-edge end of the spectrum: looking up a shaft from inside the Paris Catacombs. The rainy day at the other end of this portal means umbrellas obscure the sky.
