HDR Photography
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.
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.
Sunrise over Los Angeles and SoFi Stadium; time to say goodbye to 2021. See you in the new year!
Magenta-and-cyan “vaporwave” aesthetics go well with an Indio hot tub.
Our first post on Decaseconds debuted on this day ten years ago. I can scarcely believe it myself! In the intervening decade, both of your humble photographers finished doctorates from Berkeley and moved to new states across the country.
Looking back to how photography has changed since 2011, the rise of platforms like Instagram (have you visited Brendan’s or mine recently?) brought with it whole new aesthetics and a new generation of photographers. In spite of the possibilities that such channels allow, I still enjoy the independent posting style of Decaseconds.
In honor the past decade, I returned to RAW files from the evening of that first post and selected another image of the old, now-demolished Campbell Hall in its mummified form. Here’s to another decade!
Whether it’s a hot desert afternoon or a cool desert night, the best seat by the pool appears to be the seat in the pool.
Thanksgiving in Palm Springs has 100% more hot tub than might otherwise be expected. Can you spot Hazel the dog, on guard for coyotes?
The route over the mountains between San Diego and Palm Springs, CA 74, leads down this incredible twisting spiral of two-lane blacktop. Far in the distance, the twinkling lights of the desert valley await night travelers.
Thanksgiving in California, for some, means camping on the shores of the Lake Cahuilla reservoir.
A moment in time, glowing through the fog: lights from the old (now dismantled) and new (still under construction, at the time) eastern spans of the San Francisco—Oakland Bay Bridge.
My favorite view, run through my new favorite tool: Photoshop’s Super Resolution algorithm. My six-year-old laptop chugs a bit when running it, but the results are worth it; I recommend clicking through to see the detail in Berkeley’s South Campus.
What better way to capture San Francisco than looking down California Street?
While my normal images capturing the “civilization gradient” tend to be more focused on space (traversing from nature to dense urban areas), I sort of like the way this image reminds me of a traversal through time, from the Stone Age to the Information Age. As William Gibson says, “The future has already arrived—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Or perhaps it really just reminds me of the vantage point from Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog“.
Far beyond the glowing web of Bay Area streets, the verdant Berkeley Hills are curving and waving and tossing in the wind.
