HDR Photography
The sun-streets of California, I hear, are where longboarders got their start. That vehicle remains popular with the undergraduates of most colleges and universities, I’ve noticed, from snowy St. Lawrence to here in Berkeley. The bravery to venture into traffic on a bright Saturday afternoon is admirable.
(Or maybe I’m just jealous of the skill required.)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory sits in the Berkeley Hills, so close to multiple centers of scientific and technological innovation; the intellectual climate on its campus is astonishing. One of the newer facilities on campus is the science-fiction-come-to-life Molecular Foundry. The most dramatic part of the building hangs in space above the bay. I can’t resist the image of a spacecraft coming in for a landing.
Angel Island played a critical role in the history of immigration to the West Coast, but now it’s a nature preserve (free of invasive eucalyptus trees) with only a couple of light-emitting structures at night. This makes the island dark and mysterious at night, as it floats in front of the lights and civilization of Marin.
Christmas, back in the Bay Area! Up on Berkeley’s Grizzly Peak, alongside the tuners and drinkers and stoners, the clouds rolled over the hills and the whole bowl of the Bay lit up. This is a weird and special place.
Following Thanksgiving, all structures seems to sprout these luminescent, multicolored silica-and-copper growths. I’m sure the world’s building biologists are hard at work on a cure for “Christmas lights”, but in the mean time, they sure are pretty.
Decaseconds turns five years old just about this week, and today I’m turning 30. “Now” is a good time to think about age and the passage of time, I suppose, but I’d rather focus on something else: achievement. We’ve gotten a lot done in the past years—and there’s a lot more to come. Looking back on my early photographs on places like Berkeley’s Campanile, I can see all of the steps that led me to now. On to the next year!
As much as I liked to joke that the Bay Area only had a single season, I have to admit that if you looked for it you could find fall.
The intersection of Hearst and Euclid was an everyday sight (and site for lunch) during graduate school. Just as daytime settings become otherworldly by night, chronological distance from those days have made the setting alien and exciting. How could this place ever have seemed normal?
I didn’t think the day would ever come but I’ve become nostalgic for my time in Berkeley. The coming of fall has got me thinking about walking to campus at the advent of a new school year. Walking up Channing, past this Buddhist temple every day. The temple never meant anything to me personally while I was in Berkeley but now I find myself missing walking past it in the mornings. Memories are weird.
I love the way the rings and building reflect off the pool on quiet mornings like the one when I captured this shot.
Beyond Sather Tower’s bars and columns is Telegraph Ave. and the city of Oakland. I never forget that view, but I do somehow always forget the red tiles at the top of the campanile. I guess my brain abstracts away the details, even when they’re a major part of the scene.
I always found this random spiral staircase and the centered bamboo topiary to be an interesting fit for the otherwise sober-looking engineering building.
And here’s looking back up (on a different day and from a different direction). The Campanile also figured heavily into my morning (and afternoon) routines, being the signal that I was finally at work and also that I was ready to head home. It’s maybe the most recognizable thing about Berkeley.
In this image, my entire walk to work during graduate school is captured and arrayed. The go-to-work route of my co-editor is also hidden in the farther reaches of this picture (with the far-off Albany Hill marking its start). That hill is interesting in part because it used to have several similar siblings in the area that ere dynamited down to make room for more housing. Being a primarily landscape photographer, I’ve always liked the relationship between physical spaces and memories—and the ways the two can shift together over time. The connection of photography and memory, and the effect of going back to old photos, has been a growing interest of mine. (I articulated my general feelings in this post from 2014.)
A lot of the houses in North Berkeley look like they would make great dollhouses, or part of a great ersatz miniature town, if only you could shrink them down. We can always pretend, eh?
Decaseconds 