HDR Photography
I recently took a trip to the Salt Lake City area and while I was paid a visit to the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point. It’s a pretty neat museum if you’re in the area. This specimen is a Utahraptor, which you may recognize if you’re into prehistoric life or you read this web comic regularly.
During the blazing August heat, looking back to winter pictures leads to the oddest “time machine effect.” As you can see from the rapidly filling tire tracks in the driveway, we barely made it home ahead of what turned out to be a fierce storm. The comfort of “I don’t have to go out there” is so amplified when standing on a perfect porch, next to the door to a cozy house, and seeing the frozen, dark contrast in the graveyard across the way.
On the western edge of Cal’s campus (which is full of trees to begin with) sits this little grove of trees and benches commemorating the forestry club. The density of trees and the regularity of their positions creates this interesting corridor effect (even if there isn’t much to see on the other side).
The eternally-damp shoreline of the San Francisco Bay is the fascinating meeting of quaint docks and maritime randomness with the aggressive mass of a full-scale city. Charming piers abut the grandiosity of the Financial District, and the result is a surreal and unique setting. Amid this hubbub, the Coit Tower and the Embarcadero stand out as red beacons.
My new academic home at St. Lawrence University has involved a serious shift from Berkeley’s urban campus to the bucolic surroundings of New York’s North Country. The gentle flower-and-grass smells waft through the campus in place of petrochemical fumes, and an the evening sun provides just the right bit of warmth.
The use of space, the precision and repeated arches with their perfect alignment, makes the Cathedral of Learning pretty intimidating (but also even more beautiful.)
(The title, by the way, was borrowed from a piece by one of my favorite composers, John Adams, who in turn borrowed it from a William Blake poem.)
The seaplanes dotting the shores of Long Lake offer amazing views and transportation to visitors to the aptly-named Long Lake. On this rainy Sunday afternoon, however, they were quietly bobbing by their docks. The 1960s-era motels, the float planes, the miniature beaches and vacation homes: driving through Adirondack Park is like taking a step back in time. (The complete absence of cell reception furthers the effect.)
There’s comfort in the Adirondack charm of Mirror Lake Inn. The lodge atmosphere, the wood paneling, hand-made furniture and tiny lamps and games of checkers: it all brings me back to simpler times. (And when I’m sick of being inside, I can go sit on the porch in a rocking chair.)
Waterfalls don’t necessarily have the same impressive drama from the top, but they present another kind of wonder: the calm, burbling stream that disappears to infinity, replaced by the view of a sylvan landscape beyond. The pebbles and the trees contrast in lengthscale dramatically, but they all “belong” here.
Captured in UC Berkeley’s botanical garden.
The Cathedral of Learning, like most Neo-Gothic buildings, is mostly an exercise in symmetry. I’m all the more fascinated, then, by the little nooks and crannies that eschew this symmetry in favor of their own localized logic. This little bench-and-fireplace alcove, with its overlooking balconies and hexagonal lights, sets itself apart. I can’t help but think it’d look drastically more inviting and charming with a couple of big, woode benches pulled up to the fire. Perhaps they were missing because this was June, and nobody needs a fireplace in Pittsburgh in June.
Watching the Grand Prix tends to be the time when I shoot pictures of horses, not people, but this particular moment had a fascinating “broken symmetry” to it: the trellis and the ramp are organized perfectly, but the biological elements (the tree, the shrubs, the people) perturb that symmetry.
It’s quite pretty awe-inspiring to gaze up at the top floors of sky scrapers.
Rolling over in a strange hotel bed, in an an unfamiliar city, at 5:30 AM: not the time most conducive to photographic adventure. Seeing these dramatic clouds over Mirror Lake, and their drastic shadows, was enough to get me moving. Still, I ran into a problem rare on the west coast: it was so much warmer and more humid outside that I had to work quickly before the lens fogged.
This one was also captured at the UC Berkeley Botanical gardens. There’s something just so refreshing about the way that oranges look on the tree. You can almost taste the juicy flesh just looking at the picture.
Decaseconds 