HDR Photography
Bit by bit, my memories of Berkeley are vanishing. I can justify that this phenomenon is, at worst, neutral: the daily grind and the stupid time I missed the bus vanish, and only the weekends watching the sunset from the Berkeley Hills remain. Not to be trite: this empty, early-morning, fog-shrouded, post-apocalyptic view of the campanile is now my memory of the place, as well as an operational metaphor for that memory… If that’s not too obtuse.
One of the undeniably good things about the bay area is the unwaveringly pleasant weather we experience here. Since it’s been so nice outside recently I felt compelled to post this shot I captured last spring.
When you’re working with an ultra-high vacuum chamber, there’s no “popping down to the hardware store for a spare part.” Over the years, spares and replacements and antiquated equivalents and almost-still-good parts tend to accumulate in the cabinets of a physics lab. Cabinets start to look like set dressing in a sci-fi movie.
Looking south, over the rooftops and streetlights of downtown Berkeley, the high-rise buildings of Oakland and Emeryville are luminescent ghosts in the bay fog. I’ve come back to this photograph again and again—the composition isn’t quite right, the quality is just average, but for some reason I find it inescapable. I can forgive all of its sins (and mine in taking it) for the trajectory of those sodium lamps, arcing gently to the south like some fairy worm.
Perched atop the hill above UC Berkeley’s campus, overlooking the rest of the bay area, sits Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Perhaps the most iconic building is the advanced light source, featured prominently in Berkeley lab’s logo. I was able to grab this shot from the fire trails above LBNL in the Berkeley hills.
Hyperbright hallways in the Energy Biosciences Building come straight from the set of a sci-fi movie. Between labs and storage space are cold room facilities like the one in the foreground of this photo, with its bank of controls on the wall outside. The research accomplished here lives up to the imposing appearance: the future of using biology to harness the Sun’s energy will be born here.
This one’s a little different, here I was playing around with a pinhole on my Canon T3i. This is actually a manually measured 3 shot HDR pinhole photo of a bridge on Cal’s campus. Composing this shot was a bit of a challenge as really the only way to judge composition is to take a long exposure (in this case not that long with the help of very high ISO settings). Processing it was also a bit of a challenge as the amount of change in the lighting over the duration of the three exposures created really weird looking highlights. Still, the peculiar kind of “lo-fi” quality is neat, and I’ve been experimenting with landscapes where the reduction in detail is less noticeable.
A mid-winter shot down Telegraph Ave. to the heart of Oakland (from the top of Berkeley’s Campanile) is more nostalgia-tinged now than when I took it. And I do appreciate the way that this shot captures the Bay and the hills ringing it, the silvan suburbia of the East Bay, and even the oddly broad California streets.
Ultimately, even with the benefit of nostalgia, I still have mixed feelings about Oakland. In some ways, the existence of Oakland allows San Francisco to be an “unbalanced chemical equation,” pushing off many of its problems across the bay. Everything can still look peaceful from a distance.
I certainly wouldn’t want to have come up against one of these in the wilds of prehistoric California.
Legendary tuned cars abound in manga and anime—the overpowered monsters in unassuming guise who reveal their true (horse)power in the last seven minutes of each episode. In at least two that jump to mind (Wangan Midnight and Shakotan Boogie), Datsun Z cars are the chief culprits.
This particular Z has been hanging out in Berkeley’s South Campus neighborhood as long as anyone can remember, delivering supplies to I.B.’s Hoagies. Each year, it’s modified a little further towards some ultimate form that exists in the mind of its owner. In the mean time, I love the idea of this rough style monster out on delivery service.
On the western edge of Cal’s campus (which is full of trees to begin with) sits this little grove of trees and benches commemorating the forestry club. The density of trees and the regularity of their positions creates this interesting corridor effect (even if there isn’t much to see on the other side).
Captured in UC Berkeley’s botanical garden.
This one was also captured at the UC Berkeley Botanical gardens. There’s something just so refreshing about the way that oranges look on the tree. You can almost taste the juicy flesh just looking at the picture.
The night is normally an amber-bathed fry-cooker for my mind. On this particular night last fall, however, high temperatures and a local power outage changed the hues of the world to the red-and-blue-and-white of emergency lights.
I haven’t been posting as regularly as I’d like to recently (grad school has caught up with me recently) but since I have some time today I’ve got a double feature. This image was captured during the same outing to the UC botanical garden at Berkeley, this time in the orchid, fern, and carnivorous plant house. Keeping with the theme of the day, this also looks like some sort of crazy creature from a scifi movie.
Decaseconds 