Without being able to see the ocean below, it’s easy to forget how precarious this path is.
Category: California
Foggy Ascent
Early morning fog clings to the rocky-yet-verdant hills and cliffs of Muir Overlook, just north of San Francisco. Lichen-encrusted rocks and eerie, hanging trees capture moisture from the air. It’s not raining, but everything is “drippy.”
Vacuum Parts
When you’re working with an ultra-high vacuum chamber, there’s no “popping down to the hardware store for a spare part.” Over the years, spares and replacements and antiquated equivalents and almost-still-good parts tend to accumulate in the cabinets of a physics lab. Cabinets start to look like set dressing in a sci-fi movie.
Shattuck Rooftops
Looking south, over the rooftops and streetlights of downtown Berkeley, the high-rise buildings of Oakland and Emeryville are luminescent ghosts in the bay fog. I’ve come back to this photograph again and again—the composition isn’t quite right, the quality is just average, but for some reason I find it inescapable. I can forgive all of its sins (and mine in taking it) for the trajectory of those sodium lamps, arcing gently to the south like some fairy worm.
Miniature ALS
Perched atop the hill above UC Berkeley’s campus, overlooking the rest of the bay area, sits Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Perhaps the most iconic building is the advanced light source, featured prominently in Berkeley lab’s logo. I was able to grab this shot from the fire trails above LBNL in the Berkeley hills.
Cold Containment
Hyperbright hallways in the Energy Biosciences Building come straight from the set of a sci-fi movie. Between labs and storage space are cold room facilities like the one in the foreground of this photo, with its bank of controls on the wall outside. The research accomplished here lives up to the imposing appearance: the future of using biology to harness the Sun’s energy will be born here.
Under the bridge
This one’s a little different, here I was playing around with a pinhole on my Canon T3i. This is actually a manually measured 3 shot HDR pinhole photo of a bridge on Cal’s campus. Composing this shot was a bit of a challenge as really the only way to judge composition is to take a long exposure (in this case not that long with the help of very high ISO settings). Processing it was also a bit of a challenge as the amount of change in the lighting over the duration of the three exposures created really weird looking highlights. Still, the peculiar kind of “lo-fi” quality is neat, and I’ve been experimenting with landscapes where the reduction in detail is less noticeable.
Last Light: Port of Oakland
Across the San Francisco Bay, under the shadow of the East Bay hills, the Port of Oakland hums busily along. From far away and in the golden light of sunset, it’s easy to forget the sophisticated dance of distribution that keeps the urban tangle of the Bay Area alive.
Across Russian Hill
Like Manhattan, San Francisco is largely trapped by water. Like Manhattan, the city has preserved large swaths of “natural” space (e.g. Central Park, Golden Gate Park) in that hyperdense urban mass. The Mediterranean climate, youth, and topographical preposterousness of San Francisco give it a unique (pardon the neologism) architexture. Looking west from the trees of Telegraph Hill, over Russian Hill and on to the Presidio and the Golden Gate Bridge, the cross-section of environments complement each other. My mind still struggles to see the towers of Russian Hill in the same image as the inhospitable rocks of Marin.
Mist in the Clearing
The stunning, overwhelming, almost-heartbreaking Muir Woods National Monument in California has become a photographic cliché. (Thanks, Ansel Adams.) That doesn’t prevent me from discovering something new in every corner and every moment. The incredible contrast of scale between ferns and sequoias twists the mind, and the quiet, misty paths (early in the morning anyway) transport you to an overwhelming alternate world.
This is Telegraph Ave.
A mid-winter shot down Telegraph Ave. to the heart of Oakland (from the top of Berkeley’s Campanile) is more nostalgia-tinged now than when I took it. And I do appreciate the way that this shot captures the Bay and the hills ringing it, the silvan suburbia of the East Bay, and even the oddly broad California streets.
Ultimately, even with the benefit of nostalgia, I still have mixed feelings about Oakland. In some ways, the existence of Oakland allows San Francisco to be an “unbalanced chemical equation,” pushing off many of its problems across the bay. Everything can still look peaceful from a distance.
Sabertoothed
I certainly wouldn’t want to have come up against one of these in the wilds of prehistoric California.
Locals Only
Biking on the beach, drinking brews, and hanging out to feel the last of the spring sun at Half Moon Bay.
Just down the seawall, “LOCALS ONLY” was painted in heavy, runny pink krylon on one of these same rocks. Who was at this beach? No one seemed a local, to me.
But even more, this slogan made me think on the nature of America in general, and California in particular. This state filled up with the folks who went west until there was no where else to go. Even now, they keep coming. Even these enormous rocks that make up the wall are not “locals,” but transplants, brought in to tame the sea.
Terminal Aquatic
From San Francisco’s Embarcadero, looking south a sunset, the water provides a gentle palette. (At least compared with the jagged edges of the office buildings against the smooth gradient of the almost-night sky.) My only regret is that the water could not have been a flawless, glassy mirror. Perhaps next time, I’ll settle for a longer exposure.
Berkeley’s Devil Z
Legendary tuned cars abound in manga and anime—the overpowered monsters in unassuming guise who reveal their true (horse)power in the last seven minutes of each episode. In at least two that jump to mind (Wangan Midnight and Shakotan Boogie), Datsun Z cars are the chief culprits.
This particular Z has been hanging out in Berkeley’s South Campus neighborhood as long as anyone can remember, delivering supplies to I.B.’s Hoagies. Each year, it’s modified a little further towards some ultimate form that exists in the mind of its owner. In the mean time, I love the idea of this rough style monster out on delivery service.
