HDR Photography
Spending an afternoon wandering the labyrinthine corridors of the Cathedral of Learning renders me literally impressed–feeling the weight of knowledge and Neo-Gothic architecture on my mind. The symmetry, detail, and even the height all produce an overwhelming impression. Evidently, the effect was a bit more pronounced in the case of the gentleman at lower left. Is there anything more quintessential of the current age than slouching and checking a cell phone in the presence of such beauty?
We visited the Vermont Summer Festival this weekend and watched the Grand Prix with its 1.45 meter jumps. The physicality of horse jumping five feet into the air never gets old, but my favorite part has to be the facial expressions and the activities of the riders who muscle these equine missiles around the course.
The Cathedral of learning is just as dramatic on the outside as the inside. The Neo-Gothic lines and the oppressive cloud cover of an oncoming thunderstorm make for a feeling of significant foreboding. I can’t help but imagine that the building was designed for some sinister, supernatural purpose, and that we might need to call in some experts to fix it.
Another one from Muir woods. Teeming with life, this shot pretty well sums up why I like walking through the forest, even on a grey day.
At dusk San Francisco seems most like a “big city.”
When horses take baths, it’s a bit less dignified than the human equivalent. Nonetheless, I loved the interplay of the repeating wooden stall geometry with the smooth and random biological shapes of the horses.
The night is normally an amber-bathed fry-cooker for my mind. On this particular night last fall, however, high temperatures and a local power outage changed the hues of the world to the red-and-blue-and-white of emergency lights.
On my way through upstate New York, I paused for a day in Lake Placid. This strange Alpine-style town is the home to the US Winter Olympic training efforts, but also happens to have a gorgeous series of lakes and forested Adirondack mountains nearby. Tiny boathouses and grandiose hotels dot Mirror Lake, but this single, ideal little sailboat (with its appropriately patriotic sail) seemed apart from them all. The photograph shows the effect: the boat is isolated on the mirrored surface of the lake, apart from the summer business on the shore.
I haven’t been posting as regularly as I’d like to recently (grad school has caught up with me recently) but since I have some time today I’ve got a double feature. This image was captured during the same outing to the UC botanical garden at Berkeley, this time in the orchid, fern, and carnivorous plant house. Keeping with the theme of the day, this also looks like some sort of crazy creature from a scifi movie.
Ferns always remind me of my childhood and Berkeley seems to have so few. I grabbed this shot at he Berkeley botanical gardens. Looking at this curled up fern up close makes it look like some sort of crazy alien life form.
Having moved away from Berkeley, certain details of life in the quasi-city become more and more unbelievable. This particular abode seems to have been plucked from the pages of a fairy tale.
Today’s guest post comes courtesy of Colin Hill.
Here is the boat lauch ramp on the shores of Lake Pontoosuc, just north of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Although spring has arrived and the sun takes longer to disappear behind the mountains in the distance, the water is still icy cold to the touch.
I cooked up a bonus Sunday post: from the same waterfall on Mt. Riga where I took last week’s picture,another shot of the lovely swimming hole (and perhaps a broader perspective on what makes it such an incredibly lovely place to relax on a muggy summer afternoon.)
Having recently spent a great deal of time hiking the forests of New England, the broad, grassy, and only sparsely forested hills of California are seeming more and more alien in my memory. With the fluffy intrusion of some low-lying clouds, the whole experience is rendered otherworldly.
Today’s guest post comes courtesy of Christopher Klemm, who took this photograph in Joshua Tree National Park.
Decaseconds 