You and me both, buddy.
Tag: California
Maximum Tarmac Curvature
Just how curvy does a road have to get before it’s too curvy? Though opinions will vary, I’m sure, I have to guess that, from a civil engineer’s perspective, the Palms to Pines Highway must be pushing the limits.
Trilogy Panoramas
Drone panoramas have really opened up the kinds of images I can capture with a light, fixed-focal-length-lens drone like the DJI Mini 3 Pro.
These panoramas from Coachella Valley, covering the Trilogy subdivision and its adjacent golf course, capture a dramatic expanse of sky and wet, reflective surfaces following a rare rainstorm.
Reflecting Roads Riding Off Into the Sunset
Welcoming in 2024 with a ride off into the sunset for 2023. A massive rainstorm in the Coachella Valley turned the roads into pools that reflected the last hints of sunset to form a golden path.
Christmas After Rain in the Desert
Days of rain covered Coachella Valley in mud, but the clouds broke in time for a Christmas morning hike at the La Quinta Cove trailhead. Out in the misty distance is the Salton Sea.
Salton Skies
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.
The New Bombay Beach
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.
Swingset Dislocation
Some kind of teleportation accident seems as likely an explanation as any other for how a swing set wound up in the middle of a lake.
Swingset in Its Cove
The human-made swing set structure is alone against the huge scale of the Salton Sea, mountains, and sunset beyond. (Excepting, of course, that the Salton Sea is itself effectively human-made.)
Visiting the Swing Set
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.
Hypercube Shadow Symmetry
This shadow-of-a-hypercube sculpture is pretty enormous, but the sense of space and structure changes when view from a drone floating above.
A Trip Back to Berkeley on the First Day with a New Camera
Scenery of Berkeley’s campus from Oppenheimer had me looking back again to my RAW files (as I’ve done recently) and finding exceptional images that benefited from my evolution in processing skills over the past decade. This particular December 2012 day marked my first walk to work with my then-new Nikon D7000, and so it was a moment in which I was viewing my quotidian surroundings through a literal new lens.
The light shining down on the little bridge over Strawberry Creek to the Faculty Club, for example, is a far more interesting image to me as a memory than it was at the moment I first processed these in 2012.
Quiet monuments, dappled by sunshine, feel different from a decade away.
Big, dramatic, and green are the themes of this bridge.
I was struck by how many portrait-orientation shots I had initially bypassed. The curving stairs in front of Latimer Hall always looked charming beneath late-autumn foliage.
These stairs down to Hildebrand Hall’s D Level were my typical path to my office. They were about as intimidating in real life as they look in this picture—squeeze between the edges of different intersecting buildings and utilities pass-throughs.
Leaving again at the end of the day, the afternoon sun on Latimer’s facade is starting to shift to an oranger hue.
The trip past the architecture school wasn’t one I typically made by 2012 (I moved from an apartment south of campus to one on the west side), but the light on its concrete architecture wasn’t to be missed.
Riding/Driving/Flying Off Into the Sunset
This car/plane sculpture at Bombay Beach looks either very ready or very unready to head off into the sunset—but I can’t figure out which.
Reflection Makes a Diamond
Drone photography geometry exercise: a tetrahedron in profile collapses into a triangle, then reflection doubles it into a diamond.
Empire Polo Club Panorama
A big panorama of Empire Polo Club helps one to understand a bit how this site can hold both Coachella and Stagecoach.
Decaseconds 