HDR Photography
University Avenue connects downtown Berkeley with the Interstate. The growth of the city hasn’t been matched by the growth of the road; every year, the avenue transitions further to its (possible) future as a glowing vein of gridlock across the East Bay.
Though St. Lawrence has its share of modern buildings (including my own), it’s the old part of campus (buildings like Piskor and Sykes Halls) that best captures the Harry Potter vibe of small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.
For the stealthy, angular trimaran exterior of the littoral combat ship USS Jackson, peaking inside the ship reveals a more mundane interior (look, a forklift!) that seems oddly pedestrian.
In the Berkeley Hills, above the National Lab’s Advanced Light Source, the view over Oakland’s twinkling night sprawl entrances. Look at all of those light-emitting objects! As LED lights have replaced sodium vapor models, I’m particularly fascinated in the shift as cities glow white, instead of orange.
Scientists and engineers travel to Berkeley Lab from around the world to collaborate and research together. Though that’s a semi-permanent move for some (like me), it can also mean a hotel-length stay for others. In those cases, the lab has this charming guest house were visitors can rest between experiments.
Every corner of Berkeley brings some new quirk. I passed this little stair/alleyway dozens of times during Sunday morning coffee runs. The tall pines and receding buildings struck me as quintessentially West Coast.
Tomorrow marks the first day of classes for St. Lawrence’s Fall 2017 semester, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to look back at the strange sights of summer. The cutting-edge stealth trimaran USS Jackson is here juxtaposed with the sign for Portland, Oregon’s Old Town. Hippie holdouts in Portland seem like odd companions to a stoic Navy vessel.
In the woods of Hermon, New York, Uprooted played a show to celebrate the release of their new CD. The band’s name stems from its origins: all of its members are transplants to the North Country from across the US. Fitting, then, that the show took place in a home with many handcrafted wood details and structures. The audience stretched far back under the balcony where I hid to take this shot.
There’s spectacular luck involved in a tornado-warning-inducing storm abates just as sunset begins, leaving a rugged magenta sky in its wake. (Plus, I can’t fly the quadcopter in the rain.)
Alcatraz remains an icon of twentieth-century America. With a 500 mm lens and a view from Berkeley Lab, I was able to arrange the island with Golden Gate Bridge behind it (but not overlapping).
This is also part of my ongoing experiments, of late, trying postprocessing techniques that produce dramatic (if a bit less photorealistic) results.
Decaseconds 