HDR Photography
My time at San Diego’s Westgate hotel really was delightful. As I described previously, the environs are beautifully refined by the standards of West Coast lodging. Every wall was clad in these wonderfully-texted wallpapers, and every door used (instead of a keycard) the most fascinating electronic keys. It all felt Byzantine and sophisticated and antique.
Just after New Year’s Day, I had the chance to visit the beautiful Legion of Honor fine art museum in San Francisco. Though the museum itself is full of totally stunning works, perhaps the local architecture is even more stunning. The mix of natural and man-made elements in the setting feels so totally elegant.
Brendan and I don’t talk much about graduate school (in part because who wants to hear us complain?), but it still has a big impact on how we view the world. Long hours in windowless lab spaces make us really appreciate how amazing it is to feel the sun on your face.
There’s a particular balcony on the seventh floor of Tan Kah Kee Hall that has a clear and unrestricted view of nearly the entire San Francisco bay, and stepping out onto that balcony after spending all day down in lab can be utterly overwhelming. I think this picture really captures that feeling of the sun on my face at the end of a long, and the incredible relief that brings.
I spent last week trapped in the San Diego convention center for the national meeting of the American Chemical Society. I say, “trapped,” not because the meeting wasn’t interesting (it was), but rather because convention centers give me precisely the feeling of being in an airport without every having the chance to actually leave. The same cheapy-modern design, the same overpriced food, and the same sense of being surrounded by other people who are just as unfamiliar with their environment as you are. It’s all a bit alienating.
Still, the “Historic” Gaslamp District (Come see the 2002 Borders building, a relic of a bygone era!) can be reasonably photogenic at sunset. The area around the convention center, much like Miami, is overfilled with palm trees that always feel a bit odd in comparison with the native plants. In spite of all that, the sun reflecting silhouettes off the polished glass facade of a building makes for a gorgeous skyline.
The environment changes so completely when it rains that I can’t help but run out with my camera in the moments between storms. Today’s photograph is another from UC Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek on a particularly drizzly day. The contrast between nature and the manicured stone walls works out quite nicely when everything is wet and glistening.
This little stream was running by the trail not far from where Brendan took yesterday’s photo. At first, I felt distressed to see that tires had been dumped into the stream, but further inspection made it obvious that they’d been washed there in heavy rain years ago. There was a certain relief in seeing them encrusted in moss and being (at least partially) reclaimed.
The contrast between the blacks/greys of the tires/rocks and the array of greens in the moss, ferns, and trees worked out really nicely for highlighting the contrast between the “static” parts of the image and the encroaching life.
I’ve had good luck and bad with travel sites (e.g. Hotwire) that offer a price for a room based upon its location and general swankiness, but that hide the actual hotel until after you’ve booked. This time, however, I hit the photographic jackpot: the Westgate, built in 1970 and designed to recreate the Rococo stylings of of Versailes.
From the ornate carvings on the chairs to the silky, nearly-luminescent wallpaper, every detail screams “opulence;” spending just a few moments here brings to mind immediate thoughts of subjugating the populace.
I find 1:1 aspect ratio photographs to be some of the coolest, but taking them still challenges me. This particular image was taken in Palm Desert at HITS Thermal, and as you might expect, that means that this is the side of a horse trailer. The way the chrome distorts the other trailers and the bright sunlight makes curves on the ground made it worth trying 1:1 here.
Today is a more unusual shot of UC Berkeley’s Hearst Memorial Mining Building. As with so many other buildings on campus, the terrain and topology of surrounding the building have changed radically since it’s initial construction, with each shift requiring an adaptation to the landscaping and lower structure of the building to maintain access without violating the original design too severely. In this case, however, a fairly functional combination of tunnel entrance and stairs looks uncannily like some sort of ancient tomb. I keep waiting for Indiana Jones to come sprinting out past the ash trays with an enormous boulder rolling close behind him.
This is the imposing Latimer Hall in UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry. On this stormy afternoon, the sky and the bare tree and the building itself all took on this similar cast, but with such radically different textures and shapes. If you look carefully, the cracks and stains under each balcony level begin to resemble the geometry of the tree.
Today’s image is a shot up a telephone pole on a quiet night. I love the way the lens flare massively amplifies the oranges of the sodium-based streetlight in contrast with the blue-purple hues of the sky. This smeared palette looks particularly interesting against the pattern of cables and wires.
Back in January, when I was visiting San Diego, CA, I had a chance to drive to the top of Mt. Soledad (near La Jolla) to see the sunset. Ultimately, the day was too hazy to get really good sunset pictures, but I was able to shoot these surreal radio towers at the top of the mountain. I really like the way they stand in contrast to the bushy trees around them. Having played a lot of the fantastic Mass Effect 3 lately, seeing this photo put me in mind of some sort of sinister signal broadcast center.
A few days ago, I posted a photograph of an enigmatic pillar in the desert; perhaps today’s image can provide a bit more context to it. Off in the distance, you can see dozens of horse trailers associated with the HITS Thermal show, but other than that the environment is completely desolate. Out in the blistering sun, it was pretty intimidating.
When the weather turns cold and blustery and rainy, a warm place (e.g. library, cafe, bed) feels like a fortress. On this particular day in the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, it was definitely cold, blustery, and rainy, but without a warm place to retreat to while shooting, I made do with a literal fortress, instead.
Brendan and I have both posted before on how fantastic night shots look in HDR. Today’s photograph comes from Grizzly Peak, looking down over Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the South Campus area of Berkeley; the contrast between these two areas couldn’t be more stark. LBNL is flush with trees and tiny pockets of light along gently curving roads, while Berkeley itself is a foreign grid by comparison.
