HDR Photography
I never thought much of Berkeley’s Cedar Street during my time in graduate school, but returning for sabbatical brought me a very different connection with it. Cedar functioned as the main connection from my apartment on Spruce to Shattuck’s Gourmet Ghetto, and so I traveled it for every purpose from getting coffee and groceries to an extravagant dinner at Chez Panisse.
Brooks Island Reserve Preserve is a thoroughly undeveloped space in the chaos of the Bay Area. It almost seems as though it was transported to the present from another time.
In the sprawl of the greater Bay Area, with its networks of highway, rail, and water connecting major nodes, UC Berkeley remains a special location. The campus represents its own phase with boundaries where order parameters shift.
That skyline is recognizable, even shrouded behind 200 mm f/2.8 bokeh. Though many people in the Berkeley Hills watched this scene, and though I wasn’t the only one with a camera, the unique light-twisting effect of bokeh means that I’m the only one who captured this pattern and this moment. My favorite details are the individual pieces of grass, bright and sharp against the softness of the Emeryville background.
This object is not made from wood. (Though the far-off tree in the background is…)
This is is the top of what was once an anchor. Oxidation has transformed iron(0) metal into acres of iron(II) and iron(III) oxides of odd morphology.
Campus is (mostly) empty. The longboards and snowboards and ancient bikes are packed away. Any motion grabs attention—even shadows and lens flare.
