HDR Photography
Today’s post comes courtesy of Piper J. Klemm:
Mid-winter brings the Thermal horse show near Palm Desert, California. The whole scene is alien: the barren hills and the enormous, surreal jumps are watched over by the otherworldly poles of the lights. In HDR, the way these metal cylinders distort and section the landscape is fascinatingly exaggerated.
Muir woods, especially on a day with a bit of a drizzle, reminds me an awful lot of the good old pacific northwest.
Bit by bit, my memories of Berkeley are vanishing. I can justify that this phenomenon is, at worst, neutral: the daily grind and the stupid time I missed the bus vanish, and only the weekends watching the sunset from the Berkeley Hills remain. Not to be trite: this empty, early-morning, fog-shrouded, post-apocalyptic view of the campanile is now my memory of the place, as well as an operational metaphor for that memory… If that’s not too obtuse.
Continuing with my botanical theme lately, here’s another of the oft featured Nitobe memorial garden at UBC, in the middle of the summer.
In a moment of digression from my normal focus on landscapes: I’ve been inspired lately by the street photography of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who captured images of humanity in the “real world.” People living their lives. Perhaps it’s not traditional street photography, but for today’s photograph, I have this shot from Saturday night’s hockey game: SLU vs. Yale. Though the Saints lost, they looked great doing it. The ferocity of this imminent check captivates me.
African savannah isn’t the homogenous, steady monotony that it appears on the Discovery Channel. (Well, back when the discovery channel showed nature documentaries, anyway.) Dirt roads and hills criss-cross it, and fever trees like this one grow where more water is available. The yellow-green bark comes from photosynthetically active cells. The name comes from an interesting illustration of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: when early European settlers went near water, they tended to contract malaria (thus the fever). They incorrectly attributed this to the trees, rather than the mosquitos breeding in the water.
One of the undeniably good things about the bay area is the unwaveringly pleasant weather we experience here. Since it’s been so nice outside recently I felt compelled to post this shot I captured last spring.
In the Twainesque memories of childhood in northwestern Connecticut, cannonballing into this naturally formed pool at the foot of a waterfall stands out:
The stone is hard and slippery. The water is transparent and glacially cold. The my feet touch a soft bed of fallen needles at the bottom. And when I finally climb out, the moss is soft and the sunlight warms me.
Without being able to see the ocean below, it’s easy to forget how precarious this path is.
Taking a temporary aside from Africa (and the warm/rainy weather of weird northern New York), here’s an image from the Zen garden just after the most recent blizzard. I haven’t done much work in black and white photography since high school, but this was a case of contrasting textures and tones that just demanded it. The rough, dark brick and stone dressed by puffy snow seemed poetic almost to the point of (again) cliché—so I went with it.
Atop the hills of South Africa, I was reminded of the composition of one of my favorite pictures (of the Bay Area), and the vast changes that I’ve experienced in the seven months since I took that picture. There I was, on the other side of the planet, looking across a veritable (pardon the cliché) Garden of Eden and the little quarry used to build the lovely structures of the adjacent game lodge.
Another spectacular Seattle sunset over Puget Sound and the Olympics, this time from Magnolia’s Discovery Park. This made more spectacular by the fact that it was the dead of winter and the vista was only marred by some wispy clouds and just the lightest of hazes.
A couple of hours of sleep following intercontinental travel will never be enough to prepare for a herd (or “tower,” technically) of giraffes in the dawn light. From the back of the Millenium Falcon of off-roading Toyotas, the majesty and immediacy were perfectly balanced.
It was a typical PNW overcast winter day when I took this shot of the Fauntleroy ferry terminal from Lincoln park in west Seattle. There’s something very characteristically “Seattle” about this whole scene for me, stirring up old happy memories for me.
In eastern South Africa, the Zulu-Nyala game reserve offers an array of Hemingway-esque tents. The texture-mixture of stuccoed stone walls on two sides and waterproof nylon on the others makes the perfect rustic/luxurious combination.
(And the view of impala wandering outside the window in the morning didn’t hurt, either.)
Decaseconds 