HDR Photography
While my past approach to photography through aircraft windows was focused on avoiding distracting reflections, the realness of the Artemis II photos—specifically those with astronauts’ hands and faces reflected in spacecraft windows—made me appreciate how the nature of our relationship with Earth though technology can be conveyed. The drama of the American West is more impressive when it’s clear what altitude allowed us to visualize it.
Deep reds and purples stretch across campus at sunset. My favorite time to capture with my drone is the moment between when campus’s lights come on and the sun finishes setting—that time in which the two sources of illumination are dueling.
A sunset Christmas Eve drive through the less-inhabited parts of Coachella Valley has to end eventually. The palm trees mark the seconds of the drive back into town.
Given their altitudes, I’m not surprised that clouds and mountains would be friends. I’m a little more interested that only a single set of peaks was deemed worthy of a cloud, while its nearby neighbors remain cloudless.
Before riding off to the environs of Bombay Beach on the shores of the Salton Sea, this fellow prepared his ATV. The upside-down American flag in front of the semi-abandoned landscape make for an appropriate pairing.
From the Aviation Museum of Kentucky, this AH-1 Cobra was fortuitously placed relative to the flag.
Sunsets might be a cliché subject for a landscape photograph, but the North Country’s specimens offer such glowing, striated features with such regularity that the truly exceptional examples can strain my belief in atmospheric models of cloud formation and light scattering.
Park Street is the residential/academic (i.e. St.-Lawrence-housing) street orthogonal to Canton, New York’s Main Street. As night falls, the cozy pinpoint lights of individual homes is contrasted by the broad glow of the streetlights on those biggest avenues.
Heavy traffic isn’t restricted to city centers! This summer, Canton’s bridge over the Grasse river is being repaired, cutting it from four lanes to two. Around 8:00, 12:00, and 4:00, traffic backs up for half a mile down Main Street. (But I’d rather the traffic than skipping the bridge repairs…)
This hilltop outside Park City, Utah found itself in the spotlight when the clouds broke in the right direction.
Fires in the dry, brush-filled country of the American West can be a serious problem. Driving along the Interstate, we saw the ash-carpeted remains of one. The wind whipped the fine particles into a vertical column at the crest of this hill.
Small-town America seems even smaller in the face of an epic sunset and the thunderstorm it presaged.
Crossing the American West last winter, I was struck by the profound changes to the landscape affected by large-scale infrastructure programs. Rural electrification resulted in an expectation of electrical availability, and power lines now stretch to the horizon.
In much the same way, lines of Interstate highway curve off to the distance, twinned East and West streams.
Look at this big hill and tiny fence. Though not its original purpose, I like to imagine that fence as an attempt to hold back the advance of the hill.
In the emptiness of Wyoming, big structures along the interstate are rare. When the temperatures are ultracold and the factory is emitting tons of vapor, that brings up a new level of interest.
Decaseconds 