HDR Photography
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.
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.)
Decaseconds 