HDR Photography
Having recently spent a great deal of time hiking the forests of New England, the broad, grassy, and only sparsely forested hills of California are seeming more and more alien in my memory. With the fluffy intrusion of some low-lying clouds, the whole experience is rendered otherworldly.
Today’s guest post comes courtesy of Christopher Klemm, who took this photograph in Joshua Tree National Park.
Here is your intrepid photographer (a.k.a. me), standing at the foot of a lovely waterfall on Mt. Riga. Near the summer solstice, on the perfect warm and breezy day, we paused here just long enough to take a few shots before we dove into the natural pool beneath the falls.
On the rocks of Grizzly Peak, nothing resets your soul like seeing the hills and trees towering above the hazy sprawl of Oakland.
The University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning is overwhelming. Huge, Neo-Gothic ceilings, intricate lights, and arrays of tables decorated with busy students. I’m so amazed by this building because it’s not a library; in essence, it’s just an amazing general-use and administration building. Among these hallways are rooms decorated in the historical styles of dozens of world nations. In essence, picking a random room only contributes to the Hogwarts feeling.
With a campus as huge and old as Berkeley’s, it’s natural to expect that there would be some odd corners here and there. This particular back door, hiding in an out-of-the-way location at the back of Bowles Hall (and surrounded by creepy fences and trees) seems like the perfect place to hold the meetings of a secret society.
Today’s post comes courtesy of Piper J. Klemm:
Maggie Bracco and Alex Jayne’s Thomas Edison, Winners of the $10,000 Welcome Stake at the Showplace Spring Spectacular II at the Lamplight Equestrian Center in Wayne, Illinois on June 13, 2013.
Chicago’s suburbs are filled with older train stations like this one. In an area where quaint, older homes are often knocked down to make way for McMansions, these stations are sometimes an area’s only link with the past. (Luckily, Hinsdale is better than most areas in this respect.) On a particularly dramatic and thunderstorm-ready afternoon, this particular train platform feels like it could be unstuck in time.
Bright and fresh and “Easter-colored,” a horse show in the summer reminds me of a Seurat painting: tall trees, broad trellises, vibrant flowers, and spectators in pastels.
Up in the top of UC Berkeley’s Campanile, the carillon is made up of these enormous bells. In their environment of steel and stone and bronze, the bells seem to resonate even when they’re silent.
Dollar Days at Golden Gate Fields: dollar beers, dollar hot dogs, dollar admissions. Delicious, preposterous revelry. And rivalry.
Mostly, I just love the dynamic sense of motion captured here. (And the texture differences between horse, grass, and dirt.)
Driving into the canopy of trees on the way to Grizzly Peak means relief from all of the stress of work and life, and a moment with the beautiful roads of northern California. Today is my last day in Berkeley, and so I can’t think of a more fitting metaphor for finishing graduate school and moving away. On the Rimway, as in life, adventure is ahead.
Looking down over an intersection in the dead of night reminds me of staring at a moment without time. No cars, no one rushing in and out of the coffee shop. Everything is still. The perfect subject, then, for a photograph.
Berkeley is an eclectic, bizarre place to look at homes. This particular alleyway, with its Middle-Earth-esque Old-World charm, it less than a block from UCB’s campus.
I often talk about the “civilization gradient:” the distance required to go from high-density urban land all the way to empty, rural space. Depending on when a given area modernized and switched from, say, horses to cars, this distance can vary drastically. In “older” parts of the US, like the east coast, the gradient was largely established by feasible distances for travel by horse. On the west coast, an area largely developed after the advent of the car, this distance is usually much longer. The best exception to this is the Bay Area, where various parks around the “lip” of the Bay’s “bowl” effectively compress the distance.
In today’s photo, the whole array of Bay Area landscape is visible: the forests and trails along the peak, the industrial buildings of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the quasi-sprawl of Berkeley and Emeryville, and the full urban metropolis of San Francisco at the edge of the clouds.
