HDR Photography
There’s some sang about the photographer, not the camera, mattering to a great shot; while I appreciate the value of having the right tools, this sunrise image captured in a quick moment with my phone on a 1ºF morning provides some evidence to support the theory. The low temperatures quickly nucleated ice crystals from towers across the city and produced this dramatic array of miniature clouds.
Snow hit Connecticut last night, but for today I’m looking back on street photography from a surprisingly cool summer day in Amsterdam.
The call of a perfect summer afternoon on a bike crossing Amsterdam—dodging crowds, slipping from old building to new building, under a blanket of white clouds and green trees—sounds utopian.
Race-prepped cars are famously inconvenient modes of transportation, but when you need to get somewhere (with a folding chair) quickly, hanging from the door has a certain practicality.
I previously captured this camera car preparing for the action, but seeing it trailing a drifting Mustang in its very forward-facing grip-driving mode makes for an effective demonstration of the differences between the driving styles.
The retro-futurist art of Simon Stålenhag places intimate, perhaps even old-fashioned scenes in the foreground of images with strange, alien machines in the distance. A lone pair of nighttime snackers waiting at a slab-sided friterie trailer in the environs of the authentically 1950s Atomium represented such a real-world manifestation of the phenomenon that I had to stop and capture the scene.
Though dramatic shots of jumping horses are ubiquitous in the equestrian world, I think ones that present them in the context of the setting, alongside the audience and with a real sense for the space, are somewhat rarer. Kim Thiry ring Quick Silver can het Farasohof was in the Jumping Mechelen CSI2* right next to the VIP audience who could have reached out and touched the last jump in the course.
This CSI5* speed class pushed riders to their limit; few managed the entire course with neither rail nor speed penalties. I was capturing photographs from the last turn in the course, where riders who were still jumping clean turning to blast down the final line to the finish. Watching them put on a final burst of massive speed was dramatic, as in this case with Hans-Dieter Dreher and his mount Jiniki.
When the elevator at the core of The Atomium was first installed in the 1950s, it was the fastest in Europe. I can attest that even decades later, the effect of its speed while rocketing upwards 100 m is unsettling. The surrounding bundles of data and power cables that have accrued inside the elevator shaft over the intervening decades has subsequently added a strongly cyberpunk twist to the experience. Gibson would be proud of the repurposed space: “The street finds its own uses for things.”
The scale of Belgium’s Atomium seems to be poorly captured in pictures—perhaps because it’s difficult to capture the structure and its surroundings together, or perhaps because the 102-m-tall structure so resembles something we might be more comfortable seeing at 10 m scale. The shrinking lines of sculptural lampposts helps a bit, but it’s night that I believe truly fixes the scale issue. See the band of red in the topmost sphere? That band is the array of full-length windows of the restaurant at the top of the structure, and the red light is the lighting inside.
Trinity College’s chapter of St. Anthony Hall (a.k.a. “The Hall) may currently be closed, but a coating of snow still leaves it looking festive.
Our trip to Jumping Mechelen in Belgium provided me this opportunity to capture “Cheval Art en Scène” by Gilliane Senn from a most unexpected angle.
This lonely cottage by the dunes and brush of a late-autumn Atlantic beach reminds me of a half-remembered setting from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold near the start of the novel, on the Dutch coast. There’s a lonely quiet to the image but the road and house suggest some respite on the horizon.
The great glowing verticality of Bushnell Tower at night reveals the strengths in I.M. Pei’s original design.
Decaseconds 