HDR Photography
And here’s looking back up (on a different day and from a different direction). The Campanile also figured heavily into my morning (and afternoon) routines, being the signal that I was finally at work and also that I was ready to head home. It’s maybe the most recognizable thing about Berkeley.
In this image, my entire walk to work during graduate school is captured and arrayed. The go-to-work route of my co-editor is also hidden in the farther reaches of this picture (with the far-off Albany Hill marking its start). That hill is interesting in part because it used to have several similar siblings in the area that ere dynamited down to make room for more housing. Being a primarily landscape photographer, I’ve always liked the relationship between physical spaces and memories—and the ways the two can shift together over time. The connection of photography and memory, and the effect of going back to old photos, has been a growing interest of mine. (I articulated my general feelings in this post from 2014.)
A lot of the houses in North Berkeley look like they would make great dollhouses, or part of a great ersatz miniature town, if only you could shrink them down. We can always pretend, eh?
The golden flares of sunset in San Francisco amp up the unreal qualities of the place. That wacky Lombard Street is only the third or fourth most interesting thing about the picture speaks to the profound weirdness. I hope the homogenizing influence of extreme wealth doesn’t change it too much.
It’s not hard to imagine why folks would go out sailing on a nice day like this on pictured here in the Bay Area.
The side streets of San Francisco let the sneaky photographer creep up on an unsuspecting building. The tallest building in the skyline looks oddly small in this context. I particularly like the details at street level—restaurants, people, and signs, all a world apart from the geometric perfection of the pyramid.
I can’t think of an appropriate thing to say about the Bancroft Library at the University of California so I’ll leave a picture instead.
At the moment the sunset sets behind the hills, the sky above San Francisco is still gold, but the massive structures and high-tech vehicles of the city below are activating their illumination machines and preparing for night beneath the marine layer. If the Bay Area is a loose solar system of different worlds, San Francisco must be its cyberpunk crown jewel.
Photo nostalgia for the day: the strange, flat light of the marine layer burning off the Bay. The mix of architectural styles from the early twentieth century makes Berkeley, on a day like this one was, seem like a scale model of itself.
There are few places like an ocean beach, especially those on the California coast.
The view from atop Berkeley’s Campanile is a nostalgic one, with San Francisco and Oakland popping up in the distance above the sprawl. Walking along those broad, slightly cracked, and sun-baked pathways of Berkeley’s campus never quite felt natural, though. Can a place magnified beyond human scale feel that way?
After getting some distance I’m starting to find myself missing things about Berkeley.
Continuing my week-long digression into automotive photography, I brought back this older shot from the damp streets of Berkeley. The glow of the apartment buildings, the light trails, and the older cars on the street all form the backdrop to this murdered-out Subaru Impreza WRX. (Murdered out, meaning black rims and a dark black window tint—though I always thought this look worked better on Cadillacs than Subarus…)
There is something dramatic about the bay area around sunset.
There is something very dramatic about the rocky beaches around the San Francisco bay area.
Decaseconds 