Time has transformed a random sunset shot out the window of my sabbatical apartment in Berkeley’s Normandy Village into a nostalgia-inducing pixel arrangement. Even the wood patterns in the window frames now stand out to me.
Tag: apartment
Windy Night in Normandy Village
Odd angles and old brick in Berkeley’s Normandy village took on extra layers of strangeness on windy, rainy nights. (The blown-over trashcan in the corner provides additional evidence of the weather.)
Normandy Cube
I’ve shown many parts of Berkeley’s Normandy Village, but perhaps not these square homes (that look like cubes with roofs jauntily capping them).
Complicated Structures of Normandy Village
Down Any Parisian Street
The limits (practical, historical, and modern) on Parisian architecture make every street so dense with detail that glancing down one while passing left me moving on with a longing to explore.
Sun Column on the Rive Gauche
I took eight years of French classes as a middle- and high-school student, and those courses’ textbooks inevitably had charming pictures of Parisian locales throughout. In trying to cover a wide range of French experiences, those books tended to show “everyday” life alongside the expected pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, and so I came to associate all of these images with a sort of “imaginary,” idealized Paris.
Imagine my surprise when I arrived in France and found that it looks exactly like my books.
That Was Home
Arriving at the one-year anniversary of the end of my sabbatical time in Berkeley, I’ve also reached the end of processing pictures that I took while I was there—though many more will be posted in the future. Our apartment was on the second flood of this build, where the screen of the same laptop on which I’m currently typing lights up the bottom-right corner of the window and the narrow slit of dark windows were over the kitchen sink where I’d cook dinner.
Last Nights in the Normandy Village
The end of sabbatical meant saying “goodbye” to the Normandy Village and its quaint weirdness. I’ll always remember them as my collaborator described them: “The little Hansel and Gretel houses.”
Night Trails in Normandy Village
The charming anachronisms of Berkeley’s Normandy Village look particularly distinct on a rainy winter night. The odd experience of living there is already wandering into the nostalgic parts of my memories.
Grasse River in Town
The North Country has rough, glacier-hewn landscapes and a culture of independence. How this area is understood and depicted is often a matter of choice on the part of the photographer. Case in point: the path of the Grasse River, on its way to the the St. Lawrence Seaway. Look at all that beautiful early-spring nature!
But cropping can deceive: if I pan the camera to the right, you see a much different image. The Grasse River travels through downtown Canton, past parking lots and apartment complexes. I think I might prefer the more honest juxtaposition.
Inside the Century
The Century is a classic of early-twentieth-century Art Deco styling, but I also appreciate the somewhat understated courtyard that it presents. There’s such great texture in the brick, and the setting looks almost boring until the lovely structures in the windows and their frames become apparent.
House Face
Some buildings really have a face of their own. This image is from the northern part of Berkeley; I love how obviously the street is slanted. Still, the lobby looks quite warm and inviting (particularly on the night I took this image; the drizzle was a bit unpleasant.)
Rear Window
Different types of lighting (e.g. incandescent, fluorescent, sodium vapor, mercury vapor…) produce light of different colors. Though that’s pretty common knowledge, mixing lighting types in one picture can have striking effects and add color to scenes that might be drab in daylight. I say, “scene,” because this picture strikes me as a bit cinematographic–or perhaps even like the set of a play. I can just imagine Sharks and Jets preparing to rumble around the corner…
Decaseconds 