HDR Photography
From the graffitied logs of Berkeley’s Grizzly Peak, the Bay Bridge and San Francisco make for an incredible view—when they’re visible. The dramatic high clouds of winter are replaced by an all-shrouding marine layer in the summer that often turns the peak into a cloud bank. On the lucky nights when the marine layer is delayed, the bridge and city lights have a moment to shine before the blanket falls.
Late in the day and early in the summer, Tiburon had a sleepy vibe. Though Friday night may bring people, most have evidently not yet left work; with the exception of a pedestrian or two, it felt like I had the town to myself.
In a forest of very vertical forms, this V-shaped pair of trees is another example of Muir Woods contrarians. Taken with a tiny aperture, the resulting V-shaped lens flare makes me think of some optical axe, chopping trees apart.
On this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, the coastal roads through the Marin Headlands were completely packed with people searching for the perfect view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate.
A special weekend post: Happy Earth Day from Decaseconds!
A history of design and engineering is visible from the Marin Headlands in the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco beyond it. That’s visible at every hour of the day, so I must conclude that the people jamming the roads earlier on the evening of this image were mostly there for the combination effect with the sunset. As the crowds decamped for dinner elsewhere, the blue hour brought my favorite views of the city.
The end of sabbatical meant saying “goodbye” to the Normandy Village and its quaint weirdness. I’ll always remember them as my collaborator described them: “The little Hansel and Gretel houses.”
The Oakland skyline looks warm and friendly on a clear night in the summer, but I have to suspect that a quick blast of marine layer might be just around the corner to shift that thermal distribution.
Given the extraordinary nature of the Normandy Village, “regular” cars seem oddly out of place. Perhaps that in part because the average car has grown so significantly in size since the little bays of the village were built.
The foreground of an image from the Berkeley Hills is usually a dark network of trees and trails, but the conveniently timed headlights of a car at Lawrence Hall of Science lit up the dry grasses of midsummer. Their oranges matched the sunset.
Am I trying my hand at some sort of hipster chillwave/yacht rock album cover? No, just displaying my excitement to read Never Use Futura.
Among the vertical redwood shapes, the occasional contradictory tree trajectory is on its way to becoming a bridge.
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.
Though I’m sure both the homes and the boats of Tiburon cost dearly for their charming setting, it’s easy to forget all of that when the sun is going down and a cool breeze is blowing in the from the San Francisco Bay. That little gray house in the middle with all of the little extra architectural details is my favorite.
So many of my summer pictures in from the Bay Area face downwards because the skies are either clear or marine-layer-obscured. This was one of the rare evenings with an amazing sky of deep blues and magentas above the Berkeley Hills.
Decaseconds 