HDR Photography
The previously featured Robert Sibley Regional Volcanic Preserve is apparently home to a small herd of cattle. This came as some surprise to us while were having a stroll through the park when we came upon a small pen filled with cattle and their calves, including this one who came around to figure out what we were all about.
I’ve had good luck and bad with travel sites (e.g. Hotwire) that offer a price for a room based upon its location and general swankiness, but that hide the actual hotel until after you’ve booked. This time, however, I hit the photographic jackpot: the Westgate, built in 1970 and designed to recreate the Rococo stylings of of Versailes.
From the ornate carvings on the chairs to the silky, nearly-luminescent wallpaper, every detail screams “opulence;” spending just a few moments here brings to mind immediate thoughts of subjugating the populace.
Another shot from Robert Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, there was a small pond up on a hill overlooking some pastures and the freeway running through the east bay hills. Though they seemed reluctant to be caught on camera there were actually a pair of ducks swimming around this small, overgrown pond.
I find 1:1 aspect ratio photographs to be some of the coolest, but taking them still challenges me. This particular image was taken in Palm Desert at HITS Thermal, and as you might expect, that means that this is the side of a horse trailer. The way the chrome distorts the other trailers and the bright sunlight makes curves on the ground made it worth trying 1:1 here.
Compared to my home in the Pacific Northwest things bloom mighty early here in California. These magnolias (I think?) caught my eye on a stroll through campus and so I thought I would capture a couple of the early bloomers.
Today is a more unusual shot of UC Berkeley’s Hearst Memorial Mining Building. As with so many other buildings on campus, the terrain and topology of surrounding the building have changed radically since it’s initial construction, with each shift requiring an adaptation to the landscaping and lower structure of the building to maintain access without violating the original design too severely. In this case, however, a fairly functional combination of tunnel entrance and stairs looks uncannily like some sort of ancient tomb. I keep waiting for Indiana Jones to come sprinting out past the ash trays with an enormous boulder rolling close behind him.
This shot is amazing if only because I was able to combine three exposures of this plant taken on a day with intermittent gusts of wind which have the effect of blowing flowers like these around, typically foiling any attempt at blending multiple exposures.
This is the imposing Latimer Hall in UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry. On this stormy afternoon, the sky and the bare tree and the building itself all took on this similar cast, but with such radically different textures and shapes. If you look carefully, the cracks and stains under each balcony level begin to resemble the geometry of the tree.
This shot comes from Robert Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve.
Today’s image is a shot up a telephone pole on a quiet night. I love the way the lens flare massively amplifies the oranges of the sodium-based streetlight in contrast with the blue-purple hues of the sky. This smeared palette looks particularly interesting against the pattern of cables and wires.
This shot comes again from the Maintenance Building over the Caldecott Tunnel. It was a gray day and the building is all gray so I decided to play with some HDR in black and white.
Back in January, when I was visiting San Diego, CA, I had a chance to drive to the top of Mt. Soledad (near La Jolla) to see the sunset. Ultimately, the day was too hazy to get really good sunset pictures, but I was able to shoot these surreal radio towers at the top of the mountain. I really like the way they stand in contrast to the bushy trees around them. Having played a lot of the fantastic Mass Effect 3 lately, seeing this photo put me in mind of some sort of sinister signal broadcast center.
This shot comes from a maintenance building over the Caldecott tunnel through the Berkeley Hills. The whole building is sort of interesting looking in a really drab way and will surely be featured further but for now I thought that the way that the NFPA diamond in all of its colorful glory contrasted with the lack of the color in this stairwell which is an access way to one of the bores of the tunnel.
A few days ago, I posted a photograph of an enigmatic pillar in the desert; perhaps today’s image can provide a bit more context to it. Off in the distance, you can see dozens of horse trailers associated with the HITS Thermal show, but other than that the environment is completely desolate. Out in the blistering sun, it was pretty intimidating.
I know I’ve posted close up shots of these roses before but here I’ve processed the shot as a single exposure HDR (so manually adjusted the exposure of a single image in post and then combining them) and I’m happy with the result.
Decaseconds 