Rippling pool water, comfy lounge chairs, palm trees, and a beautiful blue sky all project a “vaporwave come to life” image.
Category: California
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.
View from the Relaxation Spot
Even without a full array of ancillary pillows, a spot to lounge by the pool on a cool desert evening seems like an enormous upgrade over the second half of winter in Northern New York.
Integratron
Landers, California’s Integratron is said to be at the intersection of ley lines and underground reservoirs, and was originally designed to hold a device that its creator hoped would extend human lifespans. While I can’t say I’ve been able to verify any of that information, its stark white presence in the desert above the Coachella Valley is certainly striking.
While it was freezing and blustery outside, within the Integratron, the enormous parabolic dome of wood (with no metal used in its construction) was definitely warm and inviting. I’ll attribute this to thermodynamics more than supernatural forces.
California Wind Turbine
An iconic image of renewable energy in California, if I do say so myself: scrub brush in the foreground, mountains in the background, and a huge wind turbine in the center of it all. I particularly like the way this particular shutter speed allowed for just a slight blur at the tips of the turbine blades.
Wind in the North of Coachella Valley
At the northern end of Coachella Valley, civilization peters out and the wind kicks up. The seemingly endless fields of wind turbines are (unsurprisingly) well-positioned: hopping out of the car to get this shot, I was nearly knocked over by a grit-enhanced gust, the likes of which I’m not sure I’ve ever felt before.
San Francisco Canyon
Describing city streets as canyons is, at this point, a cliché, but that doesn’t mean that an image of San Francisco can’t be perfectly canyon-evoking.
SoFi Stadium at Dawn
Sunrise over Los Angeles and SoFi Stadium; time to say goodbye to 2021. See you in the new year!
Decaseconds 