HDR Photography
As busy as the cities of the Bay Area become, there are the spaces in the fire trails (like the one in the foreground) to get some quiet and distance. There’s an odd orthogonality of the senses in being able to see all of the commotion below with none of the accompanying sound.
Two of my past St. Lawrence University students are working on their Ph.D.s at Berkeley and I discovered yesterday that one was giving her Graduate Research Conference (Berkeley’s version of a thesis defense, but earlier) while the other was in the audience. I’m very proud of both of them.
Understandably, this had me thinking about my experiences at Berkeley. In this picture from Grizzly Peak, the perspective folds together Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley. In the foreground, look at those gnarled trees—they’re weird but they’ve grown tall. I’ll take that visual metaphor for the grad school experience. I took this picture on Christmas Day in 2016, so I guess that makes these Christmas trees, too.
The incredible architecture of Berkeley Lab, like the Molecular Foundry hanging out into the space of Strawberry Canyon, is implanted into an otherwise natural setting. In that sense, being there reminded me of a sort of real-world Jurassic Park. (The flocks of turkeys and herds of goats on the grounds were a bit less threatening than dinosaurs, thankfully. The mountain lions were a different story…)
This auditorium in Berkeley Lab’s Building 66 was the site of weekly seminars, naturally, but it’s that balcony behind the podium that often interested me the most about the room. From there, I captured some of my favorite views of Berkeley, Emeryville, and San Francisco. It was just down the hall from my office and nearly always accessible. I won’t say I took the space for granted, but I will say I enjoyed the ease of popping down the hallway for a stunning vista.
Marine layer water clusters suspended in the air can always turn San Francisco pale, but the fuzziness of memory also layers over the time when Transbay Tower was under construction.
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).
In the Normandy Village, even the back door to the fire escape and laundry room is weird and wonderfully overdesigned.
Brittany Village is, perhaps unsurprisingly, just around the corner from Berkeley’s Normandy Village where I last lived in California. It has plenty of quaint eurocharm, but I think the “original” copy of a European village in Berkeley remains the best.
Each Sunday morning during my 2017 sabbatical, I would start a load of wash in the apartment building’s single shared washing machine and head to Philz Coffee on Shattuck (don’t look for it—it’s not there anymore). I’d stand on this sunny corner in the perfect weather with an enormous coffee and watch the world for a minute… Before heading back to change over the laundry.
Houses stacked onto the hillsides of Berkeley, California have a weird tiered geometry and features like picture windows at the corners of rooms. Living there long enough, they become everyday and ordinary… But they’re a bit surprising when first encountered.
The expanses of wood in the modern architecture of Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Building contrasts with the timber-framed buildings of old Berkeley across the street. As campus expands and the needs of modern Berkeley grow, I expect most of those older buildings in the space between Shattuck and Oxford will eventually vanish.
Though UC Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Building still stands, this particular view of the sunset lighting its wooden overhang is no longer available; the construction of Berkeley Way West in what was once the building’s parking lot has closed off that section of sky.
There’s something quintessentially “summer” about a pool party at a weird California hillside home built in the mid-twentieth century. There are little details and vignettes among the clusters of people—stories packed into the space. This party took place almost nine years ago; I can’t remember what a single group was discussing.
Lovely, gentle dusk colors—pinks and magentas and purples and aquas—settle over San Francisco and the Marin Headlands, but it barely touches the bright red (technically International Orange) of the Golden Gate Bridge.
I took this picture two years ago, during a wonderful springtime in Berkeley when a rainy winter had made the hills lush and green. The view is enormous, overwhelming: Oakland, San Francisco, Emeryville, and Berkeley all packed into one. I like the contrast of the tiny path on the green hilltop on the left side of the image providing a quiet contrast.
Decaseconds 