Author: adohertyh

The Towel Dealer

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As you might expect for a charming town on the Indian Ocean, St. Lucia is heavily carpeted with folks ready to sell anything and everything (to tourists, of course.) The waves were crashing just beyond this dune—I could already smell and hear them—but on this little rise, under the shade of the coniferous trees, beach towels and toys were for sale. The brightly colored array, flapping in the breeze in a strangely orderly way, brought to my mind nothing more than some strange local variation on a Shinto shrine.

The Towel Dealer

St. Lucia Market

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In the seaside town of St. Lucia, by the shores of the Indian Ocean, markets were filled with souvenirs for tourists from around the globe. The carving and painting and construction that went into this array was astonishing—I can’t imagine how many total person-hours are on display here.

St. Lucia Market

Time-Space Material

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I’ve posted before on the strange properties of Berkeley and the Bay Area: the condensation of nature and suburb and weird architecture and intensity urbanity that compresses human interest and life into a tiny area. This high-density material seems to deform the very fabric of space a time, and make the distance of a few miles seem like a light year and the time of a decade seem mere moments. This photograph captures the folding and crinkling as it happens: crunch clouds, sharp trees, an array of buildings from multiple Berkeley colleges within the University, the stretch of Telegraph Ave. and the tiny shapes of Oakland (at the far right) in the distance.

Time-Space Material

Hillside in Eden

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The herds of impala in Zulu Nyala Reserve have almost no fear of the people who come to see them. During the wet start of the summer, that leads to scenes like this one: a verdant savannah hillside, dotted with impala and craggy trees and brushed by the breeze. I start to think that there could be no danger to ever disturb this peace—even if I could see the inevitable cheetah hiding in the grass.

Hillside in Eden

Guest Post: Desert Nightfall

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Today’s post comes courtesy of Piper J. Klemm:

Mid-winter brings the Thermal horse show near Palm Desert, California. The whole scene is alien: the barren hills and the enormous, surreal jumps are watched over by the otherworldly poles of the lights. In HDR, the way these metal cylinders distort and section the landscape is fascinatingly exaggerated.

Desert Nightfall

Vanish to Fog

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Bit by bit, my memories of Berkeley are vanishing. I can justify that this phenomenon is, at worst, neutral: the daily grind and the stupid time I missed the bus vanish, and only the weekends watching the sunset from the Berkeley Hills remain. Not to be trite: this empty, early-morning, fog-shrouded, post-apocalyptic view of the campanile is now my memory of the place, as well as an operational metaphor for that memory… If that’s not too obtuse.

Vanish to Fog

PRE-SMASH

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In a moment of digression from my normal focus on landscapes: I’ve been inspired lately by the street photography of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who captured images of humanity in the “real world.” People living their lives. Perhaps it’s not traditional street photography, but for today’s photograph, I have this shot from Saturday night’s hockey game: SLU vs. Yale. Though the Saints lost, they looked great doing it. The ferocity of this imminent check captivates me.

PRE-SMASH

Road by the Fever Tree

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African savannah isn’t the homogenous, steady monotony that it appears on the Discovery Channel. (Well, back when the discovery channel showed nature documentaries, anyway.) Dirt roads and hills criss-cross it, and fever trees like this one grow where more water is available. The yellow-green bark comes from photosynthetically active cells. The name comes from an interesting illustration of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: when early European settlers went near water, they tended to contract malaria (thus the fever). They incorrectly attributed this to the trees, rather than the mosquitos breeding in the water.

Road by the Fever Tree

Natural Pool

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In the Twainesque memories of childhood in northwestern Connecticut, cannonballing into this naturally formed pool at the foot of a waterfall stands out:

The stone is hard and slippery. The water is transparent and glacially cold. The my feet touch a soft bed of fallen needles at the bottom. And when I finally climb out, the moss is soft and the sunlight warms me.

Natural Pool

Snow-Stone-Zen

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Taking a temporary aside from Africa (and the warm/rainy weather of weird northern New York), here’s an image from the Zen garden just after the most recent blizzard. I haven’t done much work in black and white photography since high school, but this was a case of contrasting textures and tones that just demanded it. The rough, dark brick and stone dressed by puffy snow seemed poetic almost to the point of (again) cliché—so I went with it.

Snow-Stone-Zen

African Quarry

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Atop the hills of South Africa, I was reminded of the composition of one of my favorite pictures (of the Bay Area), and the vast changes that I’ve experienced in the seven months since I took that picture. There I was, on the other side of the planet, looking across a veritable (pardon the cliché) Garden of Eden and the little quarry used to build the lovely structures of the adjacent game lodge.

African Quarry

Hemingway Tent

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In eastern South Africa, the Zulu-Nyala game reserve offers an array of Hemingway-esque tents. The texture-mixture of stuccoed stone walls on two sides and waterproof nylon on the others makes the perfect rustic/luxurious combination.

(And the view of impala wandering outside the window in the morning didn’t hurt, either.)

Hemingway Tent