“Escaping from it all” may be difficult in the Bay Area, but an evening picnic in the Berkeley Hills gets pretty close.
Category: California
Trees and City
The East Bay’s tree-lined streets make for a calming juxtaposition with “cloud city” wall of buildings and marine layer across the water.
July 4th Special
An Independence Day special: Fireworks in San Francisco, seen from across the Bay in Berkeley.
Marina and Marine Layer
Something about the iconic combination of the Golden Gate Bridge, the marine layer, and Berkeley Marina, all bathed in sunset colors, makes me think of before-dinner drinks and cool summer breezes.
Sather Tower and San Francisco
In the United States, the ubiquitous Neo-Gothic architecture of college campuses is an intentional throwback to far more ancient campuses in Europe. From a present-day perspective, of course, the “new” campuses of the east coast have existed for long enough that the anachronistic campuses now blur into a single time period called “old”. On the west coast, however, structures like Berkeley’s Sather Tower (a.k.a. the Campanile) are clearly artificial additions in the otherwise-contemporary landscape.
Civ Gradient Redux
Going back over some of my favorite images with “Super Resolution,” there’s no way I was going to skip a second shot at my image that first captured the “civilization gradient” from nature through suburbs to dense urbanity.
Watching from Grizzly Peak
One of my favorite images, taken in 2017, captures a person watching the Bay Area sunset from Grizzly Peak. When Photoshop’s new Super Resolution processing brought me back to some of my images from the same vantage in 2013, I was surprised to realized that I had already captured a very similar image. The difference between the burned-out foreground of 2013 and the lush grasses on 2017 is particularly interesting.
California Hills, Framed
The hills south of Berkeley, California just keep rolling—hill after hill after hill.
Tree Island
While there’s a real island in the distance on the left side of this image (Angel Island, in this case), the steep Grizzly Peak hills and the road over them transform hilltops into “tree islands” like the one on the right.
Final Light Redux
More adventures with Photoshop’s new “Super Resolution” machine learning algorithm, which quadruples the resolution of a processed image: a view of Berkeley and San Francisco from Grizzly Peak.
South Campus Super Resolution
The “let’s enhance” action continues with this image of Berkeley’s College of Chemistry, Strawberry Canyon, and South Campus from the top of the Campanile. It holds a special place in my heart because it shows the entire terrain I traversed going to and from work during my first year in grad school.
Berkeley Lab Super Resolution
Extracting additional information from an image by “enhancing” it has long been a ridiculous trope of police procedurals; it’s with great amusement that I noticed that Photoshop’s new “Super Resolution” capability (which uses machine learning to quadruple the resolution of an image) is under an option called “Enhance”. The first subject for enhancement was this picture I took of Berkeley and San Francisco in 2011. It’s worth the click-through for the full resolution version.
(Adding to the super-resolution theme, this image also contains, in the lower-center, the Molecular Foundry and its associated center for electron microscopy.)
Saturday Morning in Normandy Village
A Saturday morning rain left streams of water through Berkeley’s Normandy village and smudges on my camera lens, but when it was done, the sunlight perfectly spotlit the entrance to my apartment beneath a blue sky.
Cars Resting on Saturday Morning
Berkeley’s Normandy Village was constructed as a sort of “Disneyland version” of a French village, but being constructed in the early twentieth century, it included covered car parking spaces. The challenge, of course, is that the size of the average automobile has grown substantially in the past 100 years. “Compact” and “mid-size” cars barely fit; only the Mazda Miata at the left size of the image looks properly at home in its bay.
Noir Fire Escape
The back stairs of our sabbatical apartment in Berkeley’s Normandy Village has a vibe that suggests I should be chasing a Soviet spy down them.
