HDR Photography
Beautiful San Francisco and its changing, growing skyline are the site of some incredible sunsets. This image from earlier in the spring features a sunset of mostly naturally induced colors, but the fires threatening the Bay Area at the moment are producing a much more intense set of hues.
Sunday morning is the perfect time to take the family out for a coffee walk. Berkeley’s busy Gourmet Ghetto is just a little quieter then.
Racing sailboats on San Francisco Bay is the sort of upper-class pastime that seems perfectly suited for a flawless blue evening in late spring. Placid water meets busy city meets bright sails.
No offense to Salesforce, but the rainbow sunset reflections off the curved surface of their tower seem to fit much better with a building named “Transbay Tower”—particularly when it sits on the skyline near the Transamerica Pyramid. The darkened and humble shape of Alcatraz in the foreground makes for an appropriate memento mori to San Francisco’s grand architecture.
I’m interested in how scientists are depicted in media. They seem to always be in one of two modes. Either smiling at the desk with a screen and board filled with data/equations:
Or in the lab, with fancy apparatus and appropriate PPE. This may be real evidence of a sort of dichotomy in the lives of many working scientific professionals: some of the time is spent at a desk, doing the sort of email-answering/paperwork-submitting tasks that are common to many fields, but the rest of the time is spent in a more technical setting. I’d really like to see a broader view of how scientists spend their time. Could the whole breadth of the approach be captured in a single image, like some elaborate Baroque painting?
California summer: Blue skies (no clouds), dry grass.
California winter: Complicated skies (crazy clouds), lush grass.
Looking across the verdant hills of Berkeley Lab to San Francisco, it’s not hard to see why I prefer the winter months in California.
Brooks Island Reserve Preserve is a thoroughly undeveloped space in the chaos of the Bay Area. It almost seems as though it was transported to the present from another time.
University Avenue connects downtown Berkeley with the Interstate. The growth of the city hasn’t been matched by the growth of the road; every year, the avenue transitions further to its (possible) future as a glowing vein of gridlock across the East Bay.
In the Berkeley Hills, above the National Lab’s Advanced Light Source, the view over Oakland’s twinkling night sprawl entrances. Look at all of those light-emitting objects! As LED lights have replaced sodium vapor models, I’m particularly fascinated in the shift as cities glow white, instead of orange.
Scientists and engineers travel to Berkeley Lab from around the world to collaborate and research together. Though that’s a semi-permanent move for some (like me), it can also mean a hotel-length stay for others. In those cases, the lab has this charming guest house were visitors can rest between experiments.
Every corner of Berkeley brings some new quirk. I passed this little stair/alleyway dozens of times during Sunday morning coffee runs. The tall pines and receding buildings struck me as quintessentially West Coast.
Alcatraz remains an icon of twentieth-century America. With a 500 mm lens and a view from Berkeley Lab, I was able to arrange the island with Golden Gate Bridge behind it (but not overlapping).
This is also part of my ongoing experiments, of late, trying postprocessing techniques that produce dramatic (if a bit less photorealistic) results.
Just across the block from the Normandy Village is the Brittany Village, its Northern-France doppelgänger. As today marks a total solar eclipse over America, I thought another picture (this one on a rainy morning) with a weird sky might be appropriate.
Back in New York, my memories of sabbatical in California have already taken on the golden nostalgia hues of the past. If not for the photographic evidence to the contrary, I might wonder if I’d dreamed the whole thing.
Decaseconds 