HDR Photography
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.
Fire trails seem like a friendly, common, down-to-earth feature of many California hillsides. There’s a strange context alongside the blazing sky and the busy city in the distance. When I look farther off and see the Golden Gate Bridge and Angel Island, the juxtaposition feels only more emphasized.
But perhaps I like that vision. We build things both grand and humble.
Having been outside the crazy-sphere of city life for a year now, I like looking back on the outrageous geometries that San Francisco calls reasonable. (I’m guessing the number of patches are repairs to that very steep street is a testament that road crews are just as uninterested in climbing it as the average pedestrian.) It’s really not surprising that so many classic movies take place in San Francisco: drama and strangeness is built right into its structure.
This photograph is a double-case of finding interesting details by looking away from the obvious. On one hand, this subtler image was captured opposite an intense sunset over San Francisco. The color palette is heavy with pastels, but accented with a few harsh reds from Oakland in the distance. In the image itself, there’s a tiny building under the right-hand span of the bridge. Seeing something so (let’s say) adorably sized next to something so dominant and enormous makes for a charming contrast.
