HDR Photography
We’ve reached the end of 2025 and I’ll celebrate with what I think is one of my best shots of the year—and also just chronologically one of the last shots of the year. The tiny camper van and far-off lights add a sense of scale, saying “goodbye” to the distant events of that past time. Happy New Year!
The Bombay Beach Ruins is a sculpture garden on the shallow shores of the Salton Sea, and this particular swing is the site of some of my favorite pictures—but the gradual evaporation of the sea has stranded a symbol of whimsy and magic on the beach as, well, just a regular swing now.
Though sun and fun and surf (and turf?) may be the core of the SoCal identity, even Pacific Beach gets a gray winter day.
Heading back to the mainland after a Thanksgiving on Martha’s Vineyard, I captured this panorama from the upper deck of the Steamship Authority ferry. The width of our decaseconds homepage doesn’t do it justice; I recommend clicking through and zooming in to see all of the details on Flickr.
This lonely cottage by the dunes and brush of a late-autumn Atlantic beach reminds me of a half-remembered setting from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold near the start of the novel, on the Dutch coast. There’s a lonely quiet to the image but the road and house suggest some respite on the horizon.
Down at the end of the long and windswept path to Lighthouse Beach and the Edgartown Harbor Lighthouse, can you spot the little figure of the walker between the bushes?
Tiny details of docks and homes and lighthouses against the grand scope of a late-autumn Martha’s Vineyard coastline make this a image for which I would really encourage you to click through to the full-sized version on Flickr.
Atlantic weather ages every part of Martha’s Vineyard, but the combination of textures and colors of age (rusted iron, grayed cedar, turned leaves) really captures a broad spectrum of possibility. The somewhat “impossible” geometry of the image places them in juxtaposition.
A walk on a crisp fall morning with a dramatic sky is just a little better when it’s also a wedding day.
A blue hour expanse in the Netherlands with everything expected of the location: steeples, windmills, bike paths, fields of grasses, and… A beach? Given the sub-15ºC weather, this felt particularly charming but out of place.
The summer sun in the Netherlands is still scattering through the sky well after 10:00 PM, providing a companion to the reflection of this tin soldier museum on the grassy banks of the Vechte River.
Bombay Beach‘s beach keeps expanding as the Salton Sea dries back to where it was at the start of the twentieth century, making for an enormous span to match the enormous arc of sky above.
Like a full-time Burning Man, Bombay Beach shifted from its origins as a sort of “California Riviera” in the 1950s to something with more the feel of an artists’ colony. The town’s little grid of streets amid the emptiness of the desert valley brings to mind open-world video game maps, but the eclectic nature of the beach itself makes reality (as usual) far more interesting.
One of my best images (and I do mean best) captures a swing set adrift in the Salton Sea, seemingly separated from time and space. While my first worry was that an aerial view of the swing and its setting might remove some of the magic, I’ve realized that the opposite is true. The merging of sea and sky into a single cloud-graced expanse make even the mundane array of vehicles on the shore look parked at the edge of forever.
A clifftop view of Mohonk Mountain House’s swimming hole shows the impact of last summer’s drought: sections of beach that would be deep underwater are instead showing green sprouts of grasses. Even with that minor asterisk, the setting is idyllic and captures the late-summer pleasures of a little escape well.
Decaseconds 