HDR Photography
San Diego’s Civic Center, as I’ve shown previously, is a pretty surreal place. There’s certainly a feeling that you’re supposed to be in the nexus of the city’s of law and justice, but literally just around the corner, the buildings are plastered with signs for race tracks and the curbs and lined with homeless folks. I liked the way this image showed the broad sidewalks mostly abandoned, with only traces of waking life here and there.
Today’s shot has some pleasant symmetry to it: the careful lines of the trellises, the interplay between the blue of the sky and the creamy colors of the gravel, and the complete contrast of the curving and unruly hills running behind it all. There’s something personally satisfying about the way humans carve out little areas of neurotically-aligned geometry, but in the end, it’s nothing compared to the scale of the randomness produced by plate tectonics.
Today’s shot is one of my earlier attempts at HDR; I really like the composition of dark, absolute trees against the dappled sunlight, but with the benefit of time… Well, there are a variety of changes I’d have made in both the shot I took and the post-processing that followed. Reflecting on my past can be quite the learning experience–I’d like to think I’m more critical of my own work than anyone else’s.
The geometry of a horse and rider launching over a five-foot jump is so filled with muscle and agility and velocity that I find the whole event to be hypnotic. It’s over in a fraction of a second, and this makes me all the more glad that I’m a photographer. Though Piper would tell you that this isn’t quite a perfect jump (it’s a bad idea to put your groin above the saddle’s pommel–that can have painful consequences), I can’t help but respect the athleticism on display.
From what is becoming a series, “Piper relaxing,” today’s work: Piper relaxing on the roof, reading Rolling Stone on the most fantastically red, fuzzy blanket ever manufactured. A ray of sunshine for Monday morning.
Once you venture even a few miles from the suburban world of the East Bay into the hills surrounding, all sorts of weird little “model train set” vistas appear. On a rainy, gloomy day, with low cloud cover penning in the view, you could almost be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled into a giant’s basement hobby space.
Today’s photograph comes from the Spotlight Club tasting room at Robert Mondavi Winery. Everything in wine country seems manufactured to create the faux-rustic, comforting charm; though part of me rebels against being manipulated, I have to admit that there’s a powerful nostalgic feeling summoned when I see big leather arm chairs and maps on the wall and wood-panelled display cases filled with the artifacts of a vintner’s existence. Though the room itself maybe be just as carefully manufactured as some Baroque chamber, the sense of again being a boy in my father’s study is no less potent.
Watching the sun go down on an empty beach can make me feel like the only person on the planet, but little signs of life will always remain–be it foot prints or, in this case, a sand castle. In comparison with my previous sand castle post, this particularly little fortress is so much calmer, smaller, and more considered.
Berkeley’s campus becomes oddly, frighteningly empty during the late spring. By the time summer rolls around, more students return to attend summer classes and the campus runs on a skeleton crew. In the time between the end of final exams and the start of the summer semester, however, only professors and graduate students dare to roam the halls. In this context, the enormous (but now mostly-empty) buildings remind me of the decaying palaces of some deposed monarch. School is dead! Long live school!
Berkeley Marina is a wrench-shaped peninsula in the San Francisco Bay; the “handle” supports a bumpy road to the area itself, while the “head” has docks and a smattering of yacht clubs, restaurants, and smaller hotels aimed at the people mooring there. The larger boats (mostly of the sailing variety) are in the center of the Marina, but on the southern side, in a slightly-sheltered area, are the docks for the much smaller boats. Here, locals come to learn the basics of sailing and wind surfing in the shadow of the Port of Oakland and its massive container crains.
Having taken sailing lessons here myself, I can confirm that the placidity is an illusion. In a boat with a center board instead of a keel, the degree of resistance to the wind is much less, and the crew is required to really use their weight to control these little boats. Today’s shot captures the boats as I prefer to remember: ready to sail, but sitting calmly at the dock.
There’s something about a (relatively) simple wooden bridge over a wee creek that shouts, “SUMMER!” Given that today is the “unofficial first day of summer” (pools open today in much of the country, etc.), it seemed appropriate to feature something so summer-centric.
Whenever Photomatix releases an update, I like to go back and see what I can do with old RAW files and new software. This shot is a little bit older now, but I fell in love with the way it captures so much of the Bay Area in a single image: the Port of Oakland on the left, bits of Berkeley on the bottom-right, the Bay Bridge and Yerba Buena in the center, and San Francisco itself on the right. For so much of the year, the sky is absolutely clear until the marine layer blankets the bay in fog. The fog was just sliding over the hills as I took this shot; in a few minutes, the city had disappeared.
The experience of a hot dog stand: the cascading sizzles, the protein-heavy meat smells, the… decades of libertarian literature taped to the walls? Top Dog is a Berkeley institution known as much for their politics as their delicious food. I particularly enjoyed lunch here during the time that the staff was working their way through the entirety of Star Trek on DVD as they cooked.
La Jolla Shores is one of my favorite beaches in the country (as I’ve posted before) in large part due to the incredible variety it presents. The northern end of the beach abuts Scripps and all manner of salt-encrusted concrete constructions; the southern end is home to the La Jolla Shores Hotel, and often has beach weddings. On the beach itself, swimmers stay on the southern end, while surfers dominate the northern half. Behind all of this is a little park, lined by palms, and if you go there in the evening, the smell of families barbequing is absolutely intoxicating.
Here’s the exciting secret of photographing the Golden Gate Bridge: because of the cruel nature of geography, there is exactly one bluff from which to get reasonable pictures of the bridge. Greater than 80% of all Golden Gate Bridge photographs in existence are from the same place (with another 10% coming from the city side.) On any given evening, you’ll see dozens of photographers clustered in the Marin Headlands, set apart only by small differences in compositional preference.
The most interesting thing I discovered in taking pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, however, was that there is an enormous fence corralling the area. Just as most pictures use a similar angle to incorporate most of the bridge, most pictures also carefully crop away this fence. There are also myriad holes in the fence where rebellious souls have cut spots to poke their lenses through. I was most interested by the interplay of the curving fence links with the solid, glowing form of the bridge. In a way, I think today’s shot paints a truer picture of the sometimes compromised (but always gorgeous) experience of photographing the Golden Gate Bridge.
