HDR Photography
Like many East Coasters, I hadn’t heard of the marine layer until my first visit to the West Coast. The odd, damped mornings in coastal cities seem so at odds with the view of California in popular culture. Even sunny San Diego is matte and dull under a blanket of morning clouds.
Spring time is one of my favorite times for a hike. The leaves are green but its not too buggy, not too hot, and not too hazy.
Gaze over an enormous, Western, natural landscape, full of Bob-Ross-esque mountains, full of happy little trees. (Well, mostly happy. Probably not the ones in the areas that have been clear-cut.) HDR techniques make images detailed and unreal and unnatural; wet-plate effects (courtesy Analog Effex Pro 2) make images soft and faded. Using the two together, as in this photo of Mt. Jefferson taken from Mt. Hood, makes for something more supernatural than unnatural.
Students bring energy and excitement to my world, so there’s no more exciting time of the year than the start of fall. Though the school year has just ended and summer is beginning, I’m already looking forward to the next season. I live in some bizarro-world version of what I remember experiencing as a boy, when I awaited the start of summer and dreaded the return of the school year.
There are a lot of small, rural towns with the odd culture bloom of colleges planted in their cores. I think it’s the ancillary buildings, the old fraternities and club houses with their mix of higher grandeur and shabbier paint, that most signal one of these villages
That extra school year energy of students wandering the campus at all hours provides an extra energy to a sleepy place. I miss it in the summer.
It must have been nice to be Washington, being able to hang out in a nice new house while your soldiers had to hang out in slapped together cabins during the harsh winter in Valley Forge.
There are three ways to interpret the title:
Hiking the trails at Laurel Run park takes you past a couple of old “homesites” up in the woods behind the park. There’s no arguing the location is pretty, and there’s a nice stream nearby. But the placement of the homes, their remoteness, begs the question how did these people get in and out, or was this area less densely forested once upon a time?
Semesters mostly end in a slow burn to the end of final exams. There’s a different end date for almost every student; only seniors share a collective terminus at graduation (and they’re too conflicted about the whole thing to really enjoy it, I’ve noticed.) Last year, I used Decaseconds to document the feeling of the campus contracting, like a balloon in liquid nitrogen, at the end of the semester. This year, the sky and the sun seemed ready to provide a dramatic end to this semester’s classes.
Too early in the evening and too high in the sky to be a standard sunset: this must be some serious sci-fi gridfire weaponry. The patterns in the Crepuscular rays puts me in mind of MIRV tests, and the scale of the clouds so thoroughly dwarfs the buildings beneath it on the banks of the Hudson River. Connecting spectacular aerial views with apocalyptic power is nothing new, but the twentieth century swapped the power source from divine to human.
Summer’s just around the corner.
I’ve posted shots of the intense geometry of the Seattle Public Library before, but I thought this shot captured a new facet of its oddness: an ordinary if elegant entrance and ground floor that suddenly shifts to an impossible angle as the building rises.
Watauga lake is a pretty spectacular man made lake which, judging by the view down the other side of Watauga Dam (the top of which makes up part of the Appalachia Trail) used to be a pretty spectacular river valley.
That Newtonian worldview (one of cause and effect, of a Universe that is fundamentally understandable), so often criticized as unromantic and clinical, makes this setting transform: where there was once a bucolic sunset over empty fields, there is now a repeating pattern of polymerized sugars on an iron-cored planet, gravitationally bound to a thermonuclear fireball. Isn’t that cooler?
A classic New York street scene: the charm of the Empire Hotel alongside the NYPD and and bags of trash. Maybe the old man’s flyers are right: could the world be ending? (Probably not.)
Decaseconds 
