This view of Coit Tower and the western span of the Bay Bridge brought to you by the oddness of San Francisco zoning and real estate that prevent view-blocking high-rise construction. (Whether that’s a good thing is another question…)
Category: California
Lights of the Quarry at La Quinta
Tucked into the jagged mountains of the Coachella Valley, the Quarry at La Quinta seems homey and familiar, if a little out of place.
Datsun with the Right Wheels
The Datsun Z cars are some of my favorites (very likely due to Wangan Midnight), but since the originals arrived in the US on steel wheels, they’re nearly always seen on aftermarket alloys. These Compomotive-style wheels certainly meet my expectations, even if they’re not the “right” (i.e., historically accurate) units.
California Dog Walkers
When New Yorkers take their dogs for a walk, it’s down narrow, cramped, sandy, salty sidewalks in a frozen hellscape… At least, in comparison with the Californians, rendered miniature by the grandeur of the landscape.
What Planet Is This?
High above the desert of southeastern California, the expanses of sand and stone look more to me like the surface of Mars than anywhere on this planet.
Fishing on Lake Cahuilla
At one level, this is a calming, nostalgic image: two people fishing from a causeway over Lake Cahuilla reservoir in Coachella Valley.
The layers of reflections and horizontal lines, however, give it a very surreal, Dali-esque topology: reality doesn’t quite seem to be shaped correctly here. Space is folded in on itself.
Afternoon at the Brookses’
Rippling pool water, comfy lounge chairs, palm trees, and a beautiful blue sky all project a “vaporwave come to life” image.
Done Fishing for the Day
The Lake Cahuilla reservoir on the periphery of Coachella Valley makes a charming setting for early-evening fishing just before the park closes.
Home in the High Desert
Look at that little home, perched atop a cliff above the high-altitude desert north of Coachella Valley.
Curves of 240Z
The Future Wasn’t Already There, But Now It’s Evenly Distributed
My favorite William Gibson quote is, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” How we gauge futurity—or how we identify the traits we associate with future-ness—means that some places will have more “future” to them than others. A mountaintop in the Adirondacks might be pretty similar to its condition 100 years ago, while downtown Berkeley would be unrecognizable.
This image is a picture of the past, from the “future”: I wanted to print a tall, vertical image of Berkeley and the Bay but had (it turns out) never quite taken the one I wanted. I had taken the two pictures that went into making this image as part of a larger panorama in 2013 that never quite came out. Here in the present, I pulled in every technique in my arsenal—Adobe’s super resolution, Topaz AI noise reduction, frequency separation—to assemble two images from a circa-2010 16 MP Nikon D7000 into the 76 MP monster you see below. This one is definitely worth clicking through to full resolution.
Shores of Lake Cahuilla
Apparently the original Lake Cahuilla was a prehistoric lake in the Coachella Valley; its modern recreation is a reservoir in the hills outside town. The relationship between humans and nature in the region is well-encapsulated by that point of comparison.
Tall Stack
Seeking to print some images for a tall, narrow section of wall near a window in my office, I realized that I don’t shoot vertically very often. Perhaps that comes from what originally drove my interest in photography—making cooler desktop wallpapers for my computer. I traveled back to 2013 to find a vertical shot that really tickled my fancy (though luckily Adobe’s Super Resolution was up to the task of upsizing for printing.) The warm sodium-vapor-and-neon glow of San Francisco’s Embarcadero (stacked with the Transamerica Pyramid and Coit Tower) are a moment frozen in time, if not least because the switch to LED streetlights is totally changing the hue of an American city at night.
The Loneliest Car on Route 74
Along the sweeping curves of California’s Palms to Pines Highway, above the expanse of the Coachella Valley, my eye was captured by the tiny, static light emitter that was a parked car in a turnout. When the long exposure had converted every other vehicle to a ghostly stream, stillness mean detail—enough detail to start imagining noir-tinged stories about clandestine desert meetings. (I’m pretty sure the reality is more mundane…)
Desert Observatory
This mysterious small observatory outside Landers, California (not far from the Integratron) sticks out from the landscape—both figuratively and literally. Goings-on there strike me as excellent fodder for a science fiction novel.
Decaseconds 