HDR Photography
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.
Retroreflectors are used in optics to send a beam of light back from whence it came. While this can sometimes involve laborious alignment of adjustable mirrors, these custom-built “zero degrees of freedom” mounts hold the high-reflector mirrors against perfect-90º prisms to guarantee the correct geometry.
Returning to this viewpoint year after year, I’ve watched as the small cluster of white buildings (trailers?) at the bottom of this canyon keeps growing. Worksite? Settlement? Cult? Who knows, but I feel like there’s a good noir mystery to be written from this starting point.
You and me both, buddy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
This shadow-of-a-hypercube sculpture is pretty enormous, but the sense of space and structure changes when view from a drone floating above.
Decaseconds 