HDR Photography
Christmas time is here again, and Decaseconds is over a year old now. Looking back on the Christmas tree from a year ago, this year’s is off to a good start. The Charlie Brown Christmas Special Soundtrack was playing, the lights were turned down low, and we had just gotten the first strings of lights on the tree when I snapped this shot.
This is another photograph from a lab in the Charles Harris Group at UC Berkeley. I previously photographed this effusion cell apparatus from an orthogonal orientation, but I also found this shot at its long axis intriguing. The sense of complexity and purpose, but also the sense of aesthetic minimalism, always attracts me to physics apparatuses.
I captured this shot on this past summer’s trip to Vancouver, BC and the University of British Columbia. These totem poles really are a beautiful part of the indigenous culture of the PNW and its nice that UBC represents this culture on their campus.
Near Berkeley’s chemistry department are the faculty clubs. (Don’t get me started on why there is both a “Faculty Club” and a “Women’s Faculty Club.”) In any case, this lovely redwood log cabin is part of the complex. The tones of the redwood and the green roof tiles gives the picture a hint of holiday feel.
Here’s a shot I captured during an excursion to Portola Redwoods state park in northern California. I didn’t have my DSLR with me and so I was stuck with my iPhone but I figured that I would see what I could do with an iPhone shot with my usual suite of photo tools.
Wine country in the fall is a little slice of heaven. The rain had passed, the last of the fogs and cloud were rolling past the distant hills, and the golden vines are drifting into hibernation for the colder season. Perhaps vineyards are the best combination of the sophisticated and the bucolic. If nothing else, the slightly artificial reality of Napa contrasts starkly with the slightly artificial urbanity of Berkeley.
I felt that marvelous excitement of the first walk with a brand new camera (my D7000, in this case). The sun was slipping past the ivy-encrusted trees in just the right way yesterday, and it felt so fantastic to take this shot.
The labs of the Energy Biosciences Building (which, incidentally, looks quite pretty from the outside, as well) are brand new. Just weeks after the lab opened, the desks are already cluttered with equipment. I particularly liked the orange glass dividers running down the desks.
On the southern coast of Brazil, not far from where I took this shot, this older gentleman was fishing as the day came to an end. He was perched at the end of this rocky outcropping, gently casting every minute or so. He was there for quite a while, but I never saw him catch anything.
UC Berkeley’s Doe Library is impressive enough during the day, but when it’s lit up at night (from inside and outside), it’s truly imposing. On this particular evening, the ruby hue of its exterior really caught my eye.
On my recent European adventure I went out for a short afternoon walk which took me into the hills at the end of the valley beyond Obergurgl, Austria. From here I was able to grab this shot of Obergurgl and Hochgurgl and several surrounding chairlifts. It was still a little early in the season but many of the lifts were operating and people were starting to trickle in to these villages. Anyway the whole valley is incredibly picturesque and I will definitely have to return one day.
I am a spectroscopist, and this is my laser. It’s enormous, it’s fiendishly complicated, and it takes an enormous amount of time to keep it cooperative. Nonetheless, I can learn about the basic motions of molecules with it.
The farther along I get, the more I realize that the system basically amounts to Legos for big kids.
Skyscrapers really are marvels of engineering. Just think about what it takes to erect one of these massive buildings. I captured this shot in the financial district of San Francisco on a recent outing and decided to see what I could capture by pointing my wide angle lens straight up at some buildings from the sidewalk. Looking up at the sky like this really makes you feel small.
For every bustling San Francisco street, there’s a quiet alleyway like this one. The details of the setting at sunset really jump out: the cracked concrete and lumpy pavement, the intricate fire escapes and the peeling paint. Ninja Turtles are coming out of that manhole cover at any moment.
This is the tail-end of the multi-cell system used in my research group to apply monolayers (one molecule thick) to single crystals of silver. It’s a bit amazing how such a wild sentence can become mundane with years of exposure. In any case, I really love the intricacy and attention that has been applied to every bolt and wire; scientific equipment is the ultimate in utilitarian design.
Decaseconds 