HDR Photography
Conserved spaces above the noisy East Bay grid make for this incredible reprieve. Though the street lights may shine up here, the sounds are damped over the distance. Lawrence Hall of Science is a popular spot to experience this; I like the contrast in this image between the humans and the city.
A post came on social media from more than 11 years ago reminded me of trips around the Bay Area; comparing my RAW files with the images I ultimately posted to Decaseconds originally left me asking, “How did I miss these?”
In past cases of reprocessing pictures, I took another approach to images I already knew were solid. This first image today, boat sailing near Point Bonita lighthouse north of San Francisco, is in a whole different category: I hadn’t remember that I’d taken the image at all.
The occasion was a trip to the Legion of Honor and Lincoln Park. Back then, not a single picture made it to Decaseconds. Many of the images from that day suffered from issues that I know how to correct now, but didn’t yet have the tools to conquer in early 2012.
These pictures from a trip to Treasure Island to shoot the San Francisco skyline are likewise mystifying. I posted only a single picture from that trip.
The old and new spans of the Bay Bridge, side-by-side, is a literally now-unseeable image.
Though a lot of posts came of our trip to the Marin Headlands to shoot the Golden Gate Bridge, this more natural shot of the rocky coastline (those little black dots are sea birds) has its own kind of large-scale glory.
Of course, a trip back through my photography in the Bay Area wouldn’t be complete without a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge that I previously ignored.
Trinity College Dublin’s campanile was the subject of my last post, but today I’ll bring it back to one I know a bit better. This photograph is another from my series of Berkeley pictures that I’m only now able to reveal with improvements in noise reduction technology. The effect of seeing this “lost” image recovered has me wondering what other moments—
See that little camper, beneath the streetlight, near the center of the image? Though I know it’s most likely the headquarters for a construction project, I like to imagine it’s the kind of “humble abode with dramatic view” that serves as the home of some loner protagonist (see TRON: Legacy and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.)
Why save RAW camera outputs from (in this case) six years ago? Digital photography is a rapidly advancing field, and the advent of machine-learning-based noise reduction techniques has completely changed what sorts of images are salvageable. This lovely shot of Berkeley’s fire trails and tall (but invasive) eucalyptus trees stayed in the “unusable” pile for half a decade because I took it freehand, just after sunset, before I deployed my tripod—resulting in an ISO 4500 image from my old D7000 that was just too noisy. Topaz’s latest filters solved that and now this photo can take me back to my California sabbatical.
Sailboats and Sutro Tower are both iconic components of the Bay Area summer, but the warm Friday afternoon implied by this image is not a part of that post-solstice set. Like many evenings, sweatshirt weather was close at hand.
I’ve been excited about the possibilities of advanced algorithms in processing pictures, both to increase resolution and reduce noise. When used in combination on an initially noisy image, however, the results can be… unpredictable. Though this image looks fairly reasonable on the web page, clicking through to the full-resolution version on Flickr shows some exciting rogue AI strangeness—like odd places of varying noise reduction.
This view of Coit Tower and the western span of the Bay Bridge brought to you by the oddness of San Francisco zoning and real estate that prevent view-blocking high-rise construction. (Whether that’s a good thing is another question…)
The Datsun Z cars are some of my favorites (very likely due to Wangan Midnight), but since the originals arrived in the US on steel wheels, they’re nearly always seen on aftermarket alloys. These Compomotive-style wheels certainly meet my expectations, even if they’re not the “right” (i.e., historically accurate) units.
My favorite William Gibson quote is, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” How we gauge futurity—or how we identify the traits we associate with future-ness—means that some places will have more “future” to them than others. A mountaintop in the Adirondacks might be pretty similar to its condition 100 years ago, while downtown Berkeley would be unrecognizable.
This image is a picture of the past, from the “future”: I wanted to print a tall, vertical image of Berkeley and the Bay but had (it turns out) never quite taken the one I wanted. I had taken the two pictures that went into making this image as part of a larger panorama in 2013 that never quite came out. Here in the present, I pulled in every technique in my arsenal—Adobe’s super resolution, Topaz AI noise reduction, frequency separation—to assemble two images from a circa-2010 16 MP Nikon D7000 into the 76 MP monster you see below. This one is definitely worth clicking through to full resolution.
Seeking to print some images for a tall, narrow section of wall near a window in my office, I realized that I don’t shoot vertically very often. Perhaps that comes from what originally drove my interest in photography—making cooler desktop wallpapers for my computer. I traveled back to 2013 to find a vertical shot that really tickled my fancy (though luckily Adobe’s Super Resolution was up to the task of upsizing for printing.) The warm sodium-vapor-and-neon glow of San Francisco’s Embarcadero (stacked with the Transamerica Pyramid and Coit Tower) are a moment frozen in time, if not least because the switch to LED streetlights is totally changing the hue of an American city at night.
Describing city streets as canyons is, at this point, a cliché, but that doesn’t mean that an image of San Francisco can’t be perfectly canyon-evoking.
A moment in time, glowing through the fog: lights from the old (now dismantled) and new (still under construction, at the time) eastern spans of the San Francisco—Oakland Bay Bridge.
Decaseconds 