HDR Photography
The Bombay Beach Ruins now feature this fanciful pirate ship, but at its core is another sculpture with a far different 1950s-automotive-aerial aesthetic. I wonder what inspiration caused the artist to transform one piece into another—or if this was the work of a second artist? I’m reminded of old masters reusing canvases, painting over earlier works to repurpose the raw materials.
We’ve reached the end of 2025 and I’ll celebrate with what I think is one of my best shots of the year—and also just chronologically one of the last shots of the year. The tiny camper van and far-off lights add a sense of scale, saying “goodbye” to the distant events of that past time. Happy New Year!
The Bombay Beach Ruins is a sculpture garden on the shallow shores of the Salton Sea, and this particular swing is the site of some of my favorite pictures—but the gradual evaporation of the sea has stranded a symbol of whimsy and magic on the beach as, well, just a regular swing now.
Though the tiny lights of the Coachella Valley set the scale for the mighty size of the San Jacinto Mountains, even that range is dwarfed by the mighty scope and expanse of the sunset.
Though sun and fun and surf (and turf?) may be the core of the SoCal identity, even Pacific Beach gets a gray winter day.
After a nighttime poster session, crowds of chemists issued forth from the San Diego Convention Center and across the tracks to the Gaslamp Quarter.
A bright gold shirt is a great way to stand out against the black paint of this mid-1950s Buick.
The enormous interior halls of the San Diego Convention Center are far beyond the size necessary for most of the American Chemical Society presentations, so these pop-up tents divide the space in an excitingly futuristic way.
A childhood spent with a bedroom window facing the train tracks built a skill for identifying train engine paint jobs, but the intervening years of mergers and the geographical distance between Illinois and California have diminished the intense recognition that would have had me swear that black, orange, and yellow meant a BNSF engine.
So many almost-parallel lines in this image (both rail and power) gives it a disorienting quality.
Spreckels Theater closed in 2020, was sold in 2021, and leaves behind its marquee as a grim and overly optimistic reminder of a different time.
Reflections of sunset light from the engineered surfaces of an aircraft are quite different from the rougher surfaces of buildings and plants at ground level.
From a past carrying aircraft to the flight deck of the USS Midway, this carrier elevator is now a lunch spot.
This view—past tall metal fences, over bright yellow industrial pipes and through palm trees, would fit well in the cyberpunk environs of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City. Having not been back for several years, I was as entranced as ever by the strange mishmash that constitutes SoCal.
Sun? Palm trees? Ample public transit? This must be California.
Decaseconds 