This shadow-of-a-hypercube sculpture is pretty enormous, but the sense of space and structure changes when view from a drone floating above.
Category: California
A Trip Back to Berkeley on the First Day with a New Camera
Scenery of Berkeley’s campus from Oppenheimer had me looking back again to my RAW files (as I’ve done recently) and finding exceptional images that benefited from my evolution in processing skills over the past decade. This particular December 2012 day marked my first walk to work with my then-new Nikon D7000, and so it was a moment in which I was viewing my quotidian surroundings through a literal new lens.
The light shining down on the little bridge over Strawberry Creek to the Faculty Club, for example, is a far more interesting image to me as a memory than it was at the moment I first processed these in 2012.
Quiet monuments, dappled by sunshine, feel different from a decade away.
Big, dramatic, and green are the themes of this bridge.
I was struck by how many portrait-orientation shots I had initially bypassed. The curving stairs in front of Latimer Hall always looked charming beneath late-autumn foliage.
These stairs down to Hildebrand Hall’s D Level were my typical path to my office. They were about as intimidating in real life as they look in this picture—squeeze between the edges of different intersecting buildings and utilities pass-throughs.
Leaving again at the end of the day, the afternoon sun on Latimer’s facade is starting to shift to an oranger hue.
The trip past the architecture school wasn’t one I typically made by 2012 (I moved from an apartment south of campus to one on the west side), but the light on its concrete architecture wasn’t to be missed.
Riding/Driving/Flying Off Into the Sunset
This car/plane sculpture at Bombay Beach looks either very ready or very unready to head off into the sunset—but I can’t figure out which.
On the Way to Find America
Does any combination more satirically capture the American experience than an SUV and an Airstream trailer traversing the empty wasteland resulting from an ecological disaster?
Reflection Makes a Diamond
Drone photography geometry exercise: a tetrahedron in profile collapses into a triangle, then reflection doubles it into a diamond.
Tetrahedron in the Mud
AI-generated images have perhaps made us so inured to impossible images as to dilute the shocking impact of the truly surreal. Bombay Beach’s sculptures, planted in the shores of the Salton Sea, “floating” in the sky, truly look like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
Empire Polo Club Panorama
A big panorama of Empire Polo Club helps one to understand a bit how this site can hold both Coachella and Stagecoach.
Sun Drops Behind the Mountains
Winter days in the desert are short enough already, but the tall San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains cut the light off even sooner. High up with a drone, there are still some final rays to be harvested.
Water Hazard
For something termed a “hazard,” this body of water looks pretty placid in the evening light.
Best Wishes for a Fast Recovery, Coachella Valley
“Coachella Valley was just battered by Hurricane Hilary.” — What an odd sentence to write. Today, we’re looking back to times when the idea of this dry lake bed being hit by a hurricane sounded like science fiction.
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Forest Fortress
Rather than a fortress in a forest, this is a fortress composed of forest—or at least, it feels that way. While the far-off mountains and the lights of Palm Springs may be visible from the air, the ground-level setting is far more constrained and cozy.
P.S. Can you spot your humble photographer in this shot?
A Double Look Back at La Jolla
Building from my “How Did I Miss These?” post from a few weeks ago, these images from La Jolla, California likewise escaped me years ago.
In this case, though, these images are a return to a return.
While I lived in La Jolla in 2007, these images of its beaches weren’t captured until I returned there in 2012.
This bright beach-going moment was also a chance to experiment with a new manifold of photoprocessing options.
Though I typically prefer high-contrast images, the soft sky and ocean hues just weren’t a natural fit for deep, dark shadows.
This is, to my memory, the first batch of photographs in which I’ve ever lowered the contrast significantly.
Lowering contrast while increasing the exposure led to these dreamlike images.
(Though a truck atop a narrow pier is perhaps a different kind of dreamlike.)
Lastly, we finish with a dramatic panorama of downtown San Diego. This one’s definitely worth clicking through to see at full size.
A Night in the Back Yard
Holiday gatherings with palms in place of pines are out of the ordinary to this northeasterner, but the strangest modification remains the outdoor dining.
Sunrise at the Golf Course
Warm morning light on palm fronds and mountain faces, placid reflections in the water hazards: I’m not much of a golfer, but images like this one help me to understand the appeal.
Zenda Drive at Dawn
Though a photographer might briefly visit many locations, actually staying in a location means being present at the moment when the light is just right. In this case, sunrise pouring into Coachella Valley lights up the mountainsides and the rooftops, but not yet the valley floor itself.
Being there to capture the sunrise picture is great, of course, but being on location in this case also meant being able to follow it up with a sunrise dip in the hot tub.
Decaseconds 