HDR Photography
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.)
In Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood lies Seattle’s Discovery Park, formerly Fort Lawton. The park still contains the vestiges of the old military installation including this radar dome, which looks sort of out of place in a municipal park. This was taken just after one of Seattle’s characteristic spectacularly colorful sunsets.
Noticed that Decaseconds has been a bit quiet lately? In the past two weeks, I’ve been on Safari in South Africa! In the upcoming months, expect wild animals and wild landscapes.
I took this on the one snow day in Seattle this year, which happened to be just before Christmas. Though there was no trace even a day later, it did help to get me into the holiday spirit.
Today has been swamped under constant, freezing barrage of rain that carries dreariness in every drop. I prefer to remember the campus as it was in the last moments of aumtun, when one last sunset blazed through the crisp air.
The “real-world Zen garden” effect of northwestern Connecticut at the end of November was just the calming experience I needed: after a busy semester, stopping for a moment by the edge of slow stream, standing among the red, crinkly fallen leaves and short grasses, and feeling the wind lift puffs of snow from the rocks to my face.
A “casual blizzard” hit the North Country this weekend, and after I excavated around the house, I went exploring. St. Lawrence’s Zen garden was looking particularly peaceful under its (pardon the cliché) blanket of snow. The tiny structures seem to amplify the effect.
Sometimes, ghosting is a gross byproduct of taking HDR brackets in an imperfect world. Other times, it can be used to create a ghostly Schrödinger’s Cat elevator door, neither closed nor open, forever in flux. Different moments in time and space, overlapped, with brain-twisting results.
Winter crisps and desaturates the landscape, and draws the eye from the Northeast to places more southern, where I wonder if, “the grass is greener on the other side.” That might sometimes be an illusion, but then there are cases like this one: the grass is literally greener on the other side.
Early morning fog clings to the rocky-yet-verdant hills and cliffs of Muir Overlook, just north of San Francisco. Lichen-encrusted rocks and eerie, hanging trees capture moisture from the air. It’s not raining, but everything is “drippy.”
The rolling, bucolic hills of the Connecticut-New York border are one of my favorite places. The foothills of the Berkshires roll along under the late-autumn reds and browns, the clouds pucker towards rain overhead, and the decrepit skeletons of agriculture linger among the charming homes that now dominate the landscape.
That perfect New England Saturday morning: crisp fall air, vintage European bikes, bright red barns, out to get waffles.
When you’re working with an ultra-high vacuum chamber, there’s no “popping down to the hardware store for a spare part.” Over the years, spares and replacements and antiquated equivalents and almost-still-good parts tend to accumulate in the cabinets of a physics lab. Cabinets start to look like set dressing in a sci-fi movie.
