Following Thanksgiving, all structures seems to sprout these luminescent, multicolored silica-and-copper growths. I’m sure the world’s building biologists are hard at work on a cure for “Christmas lights”, but in the mean time, they sure are pretty.
Category: California
Contemplating Age
Decaseconds turns five years old just about this week, and today I’m turning 30. “Now” is a good time to think about age and the passage of time, I suppose, but I’d rather focus on something else: achievement. We’ve gotten a lot done in the past years—and there’s a lot more to come. Looking back on my early photographs on places like Berkeley’s Campanile, I can see all of the steps that led me to now. On to the next year!
Fall Leaves
As much as I liked to joke that the Bay Area only had a single season, I have to admit that if you looked for it you could find fall.
Previously Everyday
The intersection of Hearst and Euclid was an everyday sight (and site for lunch) during graduate school. Just as daytime settings become otherworldly by night, chronological distance from those days have made the setting alien and exciting. How could this place ever have seemed normal?
Saturday Afternoon on the Pier
Spending an afternoon on the pier in Pacifica, CA is as good a time as any. Crab fishing has its varied sets of tools and techniques, but the experience to me has been about more than that. Cooking on a portable hibachi and getting crusty with salt spray is the real core of the process.
Golden Coast
Feeling nostalgic.
Resilient Tree at Sunset
Of all the plant phyla, I’ve always felt a particular affinity for the conifers. Those spiny softwood survivors have a diverse yet particular set of aromatic compounds that accompany them; I can chart a lot of happy memories to pine or cypress groves and their applied organic chemistry. Starting on the east coast, through the midwest, and finding myself in grad school on the west coast meant contact with a lot of different species. These ocean-wind-sculpted examples from Pacifica, California are particularly dramatic.
Gracelynd in California
The shapes of the hills of California are odd and impossible by the standards of the Northeast. In spite of my time spent there, my brain has still not adjusted to the angles—either in the distance or under my own feet when I’m there. On a charming horse farm that might be at home in the early twentieth century, the sunbaked scene is too real to be real.
Buddhist Temple
I didn’t think the day would ever come but I’ve become nostalgic for my time in Berkeley. The coming of fall has got me thinking about walking to campus at the advent of a new school year. Walking up Channing, past this Buddhist temple every day. The temple never meant anything to me personally while I was in Berkeley but now I find myself missing walking past it in the mornings. Memories are weird.
California Coast II
Looking back on some of my earliest shots of the California coastline this evening: Light-leaked soft blues and golds are the colors. Is the soundtrack the jangle of surf music guitars or just the crashing of waves?
Rough Coast
California coastline is so much bumpier and more dramatic than the eastern locations I grew up with. Can you spot the two tiny people on the left cliff, overlooking the water? Nothing like a couple of tiny people to provide a sense of scale.
Anchor Oxidation
This object is not made from wood. (Though the far-off tree in the background is…)
This is is the top of what was once an anchor. Oxidation has transformed iron(0) metal into acres of iron(II) and iron(III) oxides of odd morphology.
Another California Coastline
Coastlines are so common in stretches of California that they are just a bit mundane. The subdivisions and mid-twentieth-century houses along the shore just don’t seem exotic or strange enough for a “special” place. Seeing a picture like this one makes mid-80s synths play in my head.
Birdblur
If this week on Decaseconds has had a theme, it has been structures suspended over water at sunset. It has also been a week of long-exposure shots that live up to the site’s title. Hoards of gulls riding on the waves are reduced to weird ghost-blurs in the foreground of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Yerba Buena, and the Port of Oakland.
Platform
It’s too bad they demolished the Miles Rock Lighthouse, it looks like it would have a great photography subject. As it stands, what’s left looks like the remnants of some kind of sea fortification of a bygone era.
