HDR Photography
Looking south, over the rooftops and streetlights of downtown Berkeley, the high-rise buildings of Oakland and Emeryville are luminescent ghosts in the bay fog. I’ve come back to this photograph again and again—the composition isn’t quite right, the quality is just average, but for some reason I find it inescapable. I can forgive all of its sins (and mine in taking it) for the trajectory of those sodium lamps, arcing gently to the south like some fairy worm.
Perched atop the hill above UC Berkeley’s campus, overlooking the rest of the bay area, sits Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Perhaps the most iconic building is the advanced light source, featured prominently in Berkeley lab’s logo. I was able to grab this shot from the fire trails above LBNL in the Berkeley hills.
Hyperbright hallways in the Energy Biosciences Building come straight from the set of a sci-fi movie. Between labs and storage space are cold room facilities like the one in the foreground of this photo, with its bank of controls on the wall outside. The research accomplished here lives up to the imposing appearance: the future of using biology to harness the Sun’s energy will be born here.
This one’s a little different, here I was playing around with a pinhole on my Canon T3i. This is actually a manually measured 3 shot HDR pinhole photo of a bridge on Cal’s campus. Composing this shot was a bit of a challenge as really the only way to judge composition is to take a long exposure (in this case not that long with the help of very high ISO settings). Processing it was also a bit of a challenge as the amount of change in the lighting over the duration of the three exposures created really weird looking highlights. Still, the peculiar kind of “lo-fi” quality is neat, and I’ve been experimenting with landscapes where the reduction in detail is less noticeable.
Across the San Francisco Bay, under the shadow of the East Bay hills, the Port of Oakland hums busily along. From far away and in the golden light of sunset, it’s easy to forget the sophisticated dance of distribution that keeps the urban tangle of the Bay Area alive.
November snow can’t hold the title “unseasonable” in Canton, New York, but it adds a gentle blanket to the campus, just the same. The soft dusk ceiling of pastel clouds and the quiet campus converge at the end of the day.
Like Manhattan, San Francisco is largely trapped by water. Like Manhattan, the city has preserved large swaths of “natural” space (e.g. Central Park, Golden Gate Park) in that hyperdense urban mass. The Mediterranean climate, youth, and topographical preposterousness of San Francisco give it a unique (pardon the neologism) architexture. Looking west from the trees of Telegraph Hill, over Russian Hill and on to the Presidio and the Golden Gate Bridge, the cross-section of environments complement each other. My mind still struggles to see the towers of Russian Hill in the same image as the inhospitable rocks of Marin.
Where earth meets sky at the edge of the horizon, the foothills of the Adirondacks oscillate under the autumn colors and I use increasingly baroque adjectives to describe the North Country.
St. Lawrence University’s Avenue of the Elms is notable for being:
(1) Very lovely.
(2) Very long.
(3) Very colorful (at least when autumn arrives.)
The sense of space and hue and Alice-in-Wonderland surreality pervade the space. On the Avenue of the Elms, the “regular rules” don’t apply and crisp fall Saturdays are forever.
The stunning, overwhelming, almost-heartbreaking Muir Woods National Monument in California has become a photographic cliché. (Thanks, Ansel Adams.) That doesn’t prevent me from discovering something new in every corner and every moment. The incredible contrast of scale between ferns and sequoias twists the mind, and the quiet, misty paths (early in the morning anyway) transport you to an overwhelming alternate world.
With dusk arriving earlier and earlier each day, I feel that the time is right to extoll the glory of clouds stretching off to an infinite (or at least periodic) horizon and the first hints of yellows and oranges in the sky matching the hues of the trees.
Perhaps acorns scattered on the beach don’t really count as castles (as in I, II, III, and IV of the series), but the neural pathways (cliché incoming: imagination) of a six-year-old, they can be elegant abodes of elves or the landing pods of a tiny invasion force. I think they fit the theme nicely. During my trip to Connecticut last week (again, tragically bereft of my Nikon), I visited Lake Wononscopomuc, where I spent the summers (and winters) of my youth. It brought my back to the thinking of that “miniature me,” if only for a few minutes.
Snow comes early to the North Country. Nothing quite justifies a cold morning more than waking up to a lovely dusting of snow and flakes in the air. The oak trees are still stubbornly holding onto their leaves, and thus there was a cozy snow-free zone (and a welcoming bench) from which to watch the snow this morning. Johnson Hall of Science looks friendly in all seasons.
On my way back from my conference in Connecticut, I drove through the Adirondacks, where winter is arriving fast. The hills were dusted with snow and all but the most tenacious leaves were carpeting the forest floor. I pulled off the road for this shot in Tupper Lake, where the grasses, placid waters, and stubbly hills matched perfectly with the dense clouds and the random distribution of sunlight. The moment felt chaotic, strange—just a bit primeval. I had a chance to do landscape photography that truly excluded any human intrusion (save the eye of the photographer himself.)
I’m down in New Haven, CT for a conference—a great opportunity to shoot a classic American east-coast city, you say? But my camera is doing double duty shooting horses this weekend! What is a photographer without a camera (and with a lovely view of New Haven in the morning from the top of the Omni Hotel) to do? I’m not the biggest evangelist for iPhone photography, but in a pinch (and with the help of a handy bracketing app), it’s possible to account for a lot of the device’s shortcomings and produce photos that can transmit at least a degree of the desired effect. For the ubiquitous “multitool in your pocket,” that’s pretty good.
Decaseconds 