HDR Photography
Decaseconds turns five years old just about this week, and today I’m turning 30. “Now” is a good time to think about age and the passage of time, I suppose, but I’d rather focus on something else: achievement. We’ve gotten a lot done in the past years—and there’s a lot more to come. Looking back on my early photographs on places like Berkeley’s Campanile, I can see all of the steps that led me to now. On to the next year!
The intersection of Hearst and Euclid was an everyday sight (and site for lunch) during graduate school. Just as daytime settings become otherworldly by night, chronological distance from those days have made the setting alien and exciting. How could this place ever have seemed normal?
Spending an afternoon on the pier in Pacifica, CA is as good a time as any. Crab fishing has its varied sets of tools and techniques, but the experience to me has been about more than that. Cooking on a portable hibachi and getting crusty with salt spray is the real core of the process.
Feeling nostalgic.
Of all the plant phyla, I’ve always felt a particular affinity for the conifers. Those spiny softwood survivors have a diverse yet particular set of aromatic compounds that accompany them; I can chart a lot of happy memories to pine or cypress groves and their applied organic chemistry. Starting on the east coast, through the midwest, and finding myself in grad school on the west coast meant contact with a lot of different species. These ocean-wind-sculpted examples from Pacifica, California are particularly dramatic.
Looking back on some of my earliest shots of the California coastline this evening: Light-leaked soft blues and golds are the colors. Is the soundtrack the jangle of surf music guitars or just the crashing of waves?
California coastline is so much bumpier and more dramatic than the eastern locations I grew up with. Can you spot the two tiny people on the left cliff, overlooking the water? Nothing like a couple of tiny people to provide a sense of scale.
This object is not made from wood. (Though the far-off tree in the background is…)
This is is the top of what was once an anchor. Oxidation has transformed iron(0) metal into acres of iron(II) and iron(III) oxides of odd morphology.
Coastlines are so common in stretches of California that they are just a bit mundane. The subdivisions and mid-twentieth-century houses along the shore just don’t seem exotic or strange enough for a “special” place. Seeing a picture like this one makes mid-80s synths play in my head.
If this week on Decaseconds has had a theme, it has been structures suspended over water at sunset. It has also been a week of long-exposure shots that live up to the site’s title. Hoards of gulls riding on the waves are reduced to weird ghost-blurs in the foreground of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Yerba Buena, and the Port of Oakland.
La Jolla Shores is a righteous beach: good swimming, okay surfing (I’m told), and excellent Southern California sights. As mid-twentieth-century architecture has grown on me, I’ve even come to appreciate the homes and UC buildings overlooking the beach—but what must it have been like to visit here 100 years ago?
Like many East Coasters, I hadn’t heard of the marine layer until my first visit to the West Coast. The odd, damped mornings in coastal cities seem so at odds with the view of California in popular culture. Even sunny San Diego is matte and dull under a blanket of morning clouds.
A study in the contradictions of California and the importance of federal lands: In the foreground is Coronado, home of resorts and Navy SEALs. This is the developed, modern California. The cliffs in the background are Cabrillo National Monument, where the first Europeans reached the West Coast in 1542. I imagine that the peninsula would be equally carpeted with homes if not for the presence of the monument. I appreciate the contrast.
Time zones are a source of confusion and consternation (seriously, they’re insane to deal with). Jet lag can be surprisingly disruptive. There are some temporal challenges to transcontinental (not to mention intercontinental) travel.
But sometimes the time zones align and travel makes waking at dawn trivial. To get a view of the San Diego skyline with the perfect mix of lighting and color, and with minimal sleep deprivation, was a treat.
The dome of San Diego’s Central Library is so much more sci-fi when set against the average buildings around it. With the hills in the background, I’m ready to believe that this is the lair of some evil genius (a.k.a. librarian?).
Decaseconds 