HDR Photography
Beyond Sather Tower’s bars and columns is Telegraph Ave. and the city of Oakland. I never forget that view, but I do somehow always forget the red tiles at the top of the campanile. I guess my brain abstracts away the details, even when they’re a major part of the scene.
It seemed crazy at the time but with some distance behind me, there are things about the bay area and grad school I miss. Chief among them are the views across the bay.
It’s not hard to imagine why folks would go out sailing on a nice day like this on pictured here in the Bay Area.
Photo nostalgia for the day: the strange, flat light of the marine layer burning off the Bay. The mix of architectural styles from the early twentieth century makes Berkeley, on a day like this one was, seem like a scale model of itself.
There is something dramatic about the bay area around sunset.
There is something very dramatic about the rocky beaches around the San Francisco bay area.
Fire trails seem like a friendly, common, down-to-earth feature of many California hillsides. There’s a strange context alongside the blazing sky and the busy city in the distance. When I look farther off and see the Golden Gate Bridge and Angel Island, the juxtaposition feels only more emphasized.
But perhaps I like that vision. We build things both grand and humble.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, all was hopeful and “excellent.” When the Bay Bridge opened in 1936, human ingenuity could solve any problem, bridges replaced ferries, cars replaced horses, aircraft would soon replace trains. Now we’re orphans of the future, living in a world when “modernity” is in the past, and epic symbols of the era and its architecture are quickly becoming relics. Though I have no nostalgia for much of the social/cultural mores of the time period, I do find it fascinating to look upon the structures built “for the future” from the standpoint of that future. Perhaps it makes me wonder, just a bit, what we build for our own future now.
UC Berkeley’s botanical garden is one of the best places to go in Berkeley on an sunny day.
I’ve posted before on the strange properties of Berkeley and the Bay Area: the condensation of nature and suburb and weird architecture and intensity urbanity that compresses human interest and life into a tiny area. This high-density material seems to deform the very fabric of space a time, and make the distance of a few miles seem like a light year and the time of a decade seem mere moments. This photograph captures the folding and crinkling as it happens: crunch clouds, sharp trees, an array of buildings from multiple Berkeley colleges within the University, the stretch of Telegraph Ave. and the tiny shapes of Oakland (at the far right) in the distance.
Perched atop the hill above UC Berkeley’s campus, overlooking the rest of the bay area, sits Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Perhaps the most iconic building is the advanced light source, featured prominently in Berkeley lab’s logo. I was able to grab this shot from the fire trails above LBNL in the Berkeley hills.
I love that time of the evening when the earth is dark but the sky is still blue with just hits of orange and red and the clouds have just a little pink hue.
During my recent trip to Muir Woods I couldn’t help but notice all of the ferns. They make up the most of the backdrop, coming in all shapes and sizes. They always remind me of home, and I’ve always found the combinations of very green leaves and brown, almost red, underbrush visually appealing.
Here’s a shot I took a while back of one of the Bay Area’s most infamous landmarks. It was sort of a gray, hazy day but with a little judicious tweaking I feel like the island really pops.
Decaseconds 