Though it may lack the verticality of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles in 2019, the cloudy skies and slightly sinister oranges put me in mind of the film’s iconic imagery.
Category: California
Two Spontaneous Alignments in San Diego
With so many tall, vertically oriented structures in a city, it’s probably no surprise that some of them should fall into pleasing alignment with one another. The modest glow of sunrise light through the gap between the clocktower and the adjacent building provides a friendly spark to guide the eye to the center of this image.
In this second case, it’s harsher Sun, rather than palm trees and clock towers, that has found its way into a special alignment through the streets of San Diego. Bright light falls into this canyon that should otherwise be dawn dim.
Los Angeles River When Wet
While the L.A. River might be better known as the site of chase scenes in action movies when dry, the wet winter in California has turned it into a reflective ribbon through the grid.
Muscle Cars at Dawn in San Diego
Dawn makes for this dynamic moment when parts of a scene are thrown into dramatic sunlight while others still benefit from delicate, scattered, indirect light.
I like these shots for how the Ford Mustang and Dodge Charger are bathed in relatively gentle, flattering light, but headlights and sunlight make the rest of the scene comparatively high-contrast.
Sunrise in Southern California
High above the hills and mountains of Southern California, there is a moment, right around dawn, when the dark hues of earth and the reflected light from the lakes lets one image what the area looked like before human structures sprawled through the valleys.
A E S T H E T I C Rail
I’ve played with that 90’s vaporwave aesthetic in the past with aggressive color grading; on this particular San Diego dawn, those steps were hardly necessary. Palm trees and magenta hues do most of the hard work for themselves. I can hear the synths already…
Farms Amid the Dark Earth
A dawn flight from Palm Springs to Los Angeles (long story) passed over land that looked like potting soil—so muddy and fertile.
Waiting for Work
This sequence of three images, captured over the course of a morning (dawn to rush hour), paints an oddly small-town-ish picture of citizens waiting for the San Diego Trolley.
Suburbs Up to the Wall
An early-morning flight out of Palm Springs airport paints gentle hues onto the massive wall that is Mt. San Jacinto. The orderly, be-palm-tree’d grid of the valley floor runs so sharply into the mountainside that I was immediately reminded that a sea once occupied the valley.
San Diego Runners
I last traveled to San Diego to present at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society—but while that meeting took place during the day, early morning was unaccounted-for time. I went exploring in the area around the San Diego Convention Center and found that most of my early-morning compatriots were runners.
In this quartet of images, I’ve captured a few of those runners in the dramatic early-morning California sunlight.
Dry Paths and Trails
Rain brings spontaneous desert symmetry breaking: some areas become rivers and streams, while others stay high and dry. La Quinta Cove brings hiking trails into this equation. Looking high over the landscape, those trails and dry streambeds may be hard to distinguish—until the rain comes. In the distance, just above the tan tanks on the left of the image, the Salton Sea serves as a reminder of how water and the desert interact.
Desert Until the Valley Floor
Mountains and hillsides in Coachella Valley are a rocky, scrubby desert so long as they stay sufficiently sloped; the moment they reach the flat ex-lake valley floor, the housing developments begin.
Flying is Easier Than Hiking
The path at right is a fairly treacherous, dusty way up to the top of this hill; it’s the one I took last year to capture images like this one. Flying to the top with my drone is, by comparison, a bit less strenuous.
Hill Structure
My trips to this hill last year were constrained by the limitations of gravity; bringing my drone with me this year opened up whole new vistas and geometries. The artificial nature of this water retention area is far more apparent when view from the air.
Where the Houses Stop/Palm Trees and Sprawl
Like a child’s legos, spilled out onto the floor until they reach the wall of the room, the sprawl of Coachella Valley reaches from one mountain range to the other.
Of course, when that sprawl does reach the edge, modern California’s land conservation kicks in and a hard barrier appears between homes and desert.
Decaseconds 