HDR Photography
While in Vancouver, BC, this weekend, this mid-1950’s Austin Healey 100 (check out that chopped windscreen!) blasted past us. (And I know it’s not technically a hot rod.) I just loved the driver’s expression and demeanor: hair blown back, sunglasses on, focused on the drive. The details of this picture are what really get me, though; the car was perfectly washed and waxed, and you can see reflections of both the road and the surrounding buildings in its perfect surface.
It may be hard to imagine that a kid that grew up in and around Seattle then went to school in Bellingham never managed to make it up to visit Vancouver, BC but somehow this describes me. Not that I never made it to Canada, I visited Victoria, BC plenty of times in high school. Now having visited I’d estimate I missed out on a lot by not visiting sooner. In the Vancouver environs is the beautiful campus of the University of British Columbia which is really something. I’d say that UBC’s campus is, in many respects, precisely what a campus should be. Here’s a college campus which is incredibly close to major metropolitan area but which has somehow managed to completely surround itself with nature.
Pictured here is a shot in the late afternoon of one of the myriad of green spaces on campus, a rose garden perched atop a parking garage. What better way is there to hide an ugly, but necessary, facility than to cover it with something people want to look at? The view of the water and mountains beyond are just bonuses as far as I’m concerned.
Today is a travel day for us, so I’ll be pulling an older shot out of the collection. A workbench, mid-job has this wonderful degree of barely ordered chaos. The sense of capability, competency, and potential is heady mix.
Another shot from Shorewood’s community beach, this time looking to the south at (from right to left) Three Tree Point, Seahurst park, and the waterfront houses on Standring Lane. The water was exceptionally calm on this summer evening and the gentle lapping and soft lighting were extraordinarily relaxing. At low tide you can practically walk straight across to Seahurst beach, but alas this was taken at an extremely high tide.
These three trees (try saying that one three times fast) outline a little glade in the Berkeley Hills. Their needles and shade enforce the limits of a calm place for an afternoon nap.
I spent several nights this week at Oregon’s Timberline Lodge, located very literally at the timber line of Mt. Hood. Just outside the room is nearly year-round skiing on the Palmer glacier (and the exterior used in The Shining), but the interior is constructed of enormous wood beams, nearly 100 years old (the lodge was built in 1936). The center of the hotel is this multi-story common room, featuring multiple levels of tiny reading areas, enormous fire places, and friendly bars.
As much as I like the California ocean beaches for being the epitome of ocean beaches, I think my favorite beaches are the ones around Puget Sound. They may not be particularly sandy except at low tide, and the water may be too cold to really enjoy even during the hottest part of summer but Puget Sound is always so calm and subdued. It’s a gentle lapping of waves rather than a roar of the surf.
I had my own staging of Two-Lane Blacktop in central Oregon this weekend, with the company of this particularly lovely 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet. This is grass seed country, and this particular weekend fell in the middle of the harvest. Long, perfectly maintained roads are intercut with forested hillsides and busy fields. By this point in the evening, however, nightfall brought calm with it.
For every sunny hilltop like the one above, there was a tree-lined valley. The setting sun really picks out the details of every treetop, but it’s a shame that Oregon has such a clean, healthy atmosphere. Without other molecules in the air to scatter the light, the sunsets lack the exciting colors of other parts of the country. This photograph captures the feeling of blasting down the road, wind in my hair, with only an occasional truck for company.
One of things I remember most about growing up where I did was the view of the moon’s light reflecting off of Puget Sound. On particularly calm and clear nights the moon’s reflection will be particularly clear, almost like there are two moons. It was a little cloudy on this particular night but it was still a spectacular sight; it almost looks like a painting.
Though I posted photographs taken in UC Berkeley’s machine shop before, I keep coming back to its complicated-but-calming tools and machines. The sense of decades-old purpose and function in this lathe sprouts from every scratch and dent.
The Longwood Cricket Club of Boston, MA no longer plays cricket. In fact, its members haven’t really played cricket for more than 100 years. What they do play is tennis, and they have acres of gorgeous grass courts on which to do so. On this particular day, as members relaxed on the front porch, the grass courts were empty. A massive storm the night before (that I also had a chance to photograph) meant that the courts were too wet. The view was perhaps all the more surreal for the juxtaposition of crowded porch and empty courts.
I know I’ve said it before but probably my favorite thing about California is the coast, and probably the folks out on the beach on this particular day would agree with me. I don’t know that I’d have the fortitude to surf the chilly waters of the northern California coast but the surf does look sort of inviting in the late afternoon.
Brendan has previously posted a several of gorgeous shots of Half Moon Bay and its associated Pillar Point air force base. This particular shot shows a different kind of Cold War-era neurotic nostalgia that I find really enticing. On one hand, this young couple is gazing off at the family silhouetted in the sunset–a vision of their future. On the other hand, the radar dome of the Pillar Point AFS is a sinister reminder of Cold War-era threats from across the ocean. Taken together, I’d like to think it’s emblematic of the Californian experience for a lot of folks: promise and peril.
The libraries on UC Berkeley’s campus are truly a sight to behold (if you ever get the chance to check out the Gardner Stacks, do it; it’s a massive underground book repository and it is amazing, like the ruins in Skyrim or something) but perhaps none more than the Doe Memorial Library previously featured here and here. The scale is truly amazing. You can compare it to the people sitting around the steps for a sense of scale, but this is massive and it feels twice as big on the inside.
California in the summer–always sunny, never a cloud in the sky… And on the east coast (Vermont, in this case), I was instead buffeted by massive, overpowering storms. That refreshing summer storm feeling, and the mountaintop views that go with them, make me a bit nostalgic.
Decaseconds 