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 the tiny lights of the Coachella Valley set the scale for the mighty size of the San Jacinto Mountains, even that range is dwarfed by the mighty scope and expanse of the sunset.
Though sun and fun and surf (and turf?) may be the core of the SoCal identity, even Pacific Beach gets a gray winter day.
After a nighttime poster session, crowds of chemists issued forth from the San Diego Convention Center and across the tracks to the Gaslamp Quarter.
The enormous interior halls of the San Diego Convention Center are far beyond the size necessary for most of the American Chemical Society presentations, so these pop-up tents divide the space in an excitingly futuristic way.
A childhood spent with a bedroom window facing the train tracks built a skill for identifying train engine paint jobs, but the intervening years of mergers and the geographical distance between Illinois and California have diminished the intense recognition that would have had me swear that black, orange, and yellow meant a BNSF engine.
So many almost-parallel lines in this image (both rail and power) gives it a disorienting quality.
Spreckels Theater closed in 2020, was sold in 2021, and leaves behind its marquee as a grim and overly optimistic reminder of a different time.
From a past carrying aircraft to the flight deck of the USS Midway, this carrier elevator is now a lunch spot.
Sun? Palm trees? Ample public transit? This must be California.
I recently moved into a new office with a huge, boring, blank wall totally ready for a huge, interesting, dramatic landscape. That naturally meant returning to one of my favorite land/cityscapes, this view of Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Marin from sabbatical in 2017. For an image I expect to stare at for years to come, I really pulled out the stops in terms of producing the best possible image. Click through to Flickr to zoom in and get all of the details!
A shot of a basically antique lathe from back in the Berkeley student machine shop. New or old, that chuck needs to keep the part in place when it spins up to speed—and it definitely did.
I captured this image more than a decade ago to show the pleasing trio of power receptacles mounted to the wall behind our boxed-up laser system, but I was also inadvertently capturing a kind of self-portrait in the reflection of my legs and tripod in the polished laser box panel.
For all of the fancy-looking holders and posts and hardware, an optical table is ultimately designed to put specific optics in front of the laser beam as it travels to generate a desired effect. This view of the space leading to our detector shows how many parts can accrue in pursuit of a given goal.
Decaseconds 