Winter days in the desert are short enough already, but the tall San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains cut the light off even sooner. High up with a drone, there are still some final rays to be harvested.
Tag: California
A Night in the Back Yard
Holiday gatherings with palms in place of pines are out of the ordinary to this northeasterner, but the strangest modification remains the outdoor dining.
Zenda Drive at Dawn
Though a photographer might briefly visit many locations, actually staying in a location means being present at the moment when the light is just right. In this case, sunrise pouring into Coachella Valley lights up the mountainsides and the rooftops, but not yet the valley floor itself.
Being there to capture the sunrise picture is great, of course, but being on location in this case also meant being able to follow it up with a sunrise dip in the hot tub.
Interruptions in the Coachella Valley Array
The dry seabed that is Coachella Valley provides a very flat surface for construction; as a result, modern constructions mostly fall on whatever pattern/array is convenient to the developers. In a few places, however, interruptions in those arrays stand out in an aerial view.
The palms on this golf course, for example, are on a clear grid, with the fairways and greens cut into it. Was this a palm plantation before the course was build?
Here, the green lawn of a larger home stands out, covering multiple grid positions, while neighboring homes cluster into smaller, more regularly arrayed lots.
Though this subdivision isn’t itself on a grid, the clubhouse nonetheless interrupts the pattern.
Sunset from Atop the Kia
I’m not sure that it’s great for the Kia, but watching a Bay Area sunset from the roof of a car gives “classic California” vibes that make for a great picture.
Coachella Valley Sunrise
A big, broad, western-America sunrise may feel summer-y, but this one was taken in the depths of winter.
How Did I Miss These?
A post came on social media from more than 11 years ago reminded me of trips around the Bay Area; comparing my RAW files with the images I ultimately posted to Decaseconds originally left me asking, “How did I miss these?”
In past cases of reprocessing pictures, I took another approach to images I already knew were solid. This first image today, boat sailing near Point Bonita lighthouse north of San Francisco, is in a whole different category: I hadn’t remember that I’d taken the image at all.
The occasion was a trip to the Legion of Honor and Lincoln Park. Back then, not a single picture made it to Decaseconds. Many of the images from that day suffered from issues that I know how to correct now, but didn’t yet have the tools to conquer in early 2012.
These pictures from a trip to Treasure Island to shoot the San Francisco skyline are likewise mystifying. I posted only a single picture from that trip.
The old and new spans of the Bay Bridge, side-by-side, is a literally now-unseeable image.
Though a lot of posts came of our trip to the Marin Headlands to shoot the Golden Gate Bridge, this more natural shot of the rocky coastline (those little black dots are sea birds) has its own kind of large-scale glory.
Of course, a trip back through my photography in the Bay Area wouldn’t be complete without a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge that I previously ignored.
Big Buildings and Little Ones
Trinity College Dublin’s campanile was the subject of my last post, but today I’ll bring it back to one I know a bit better. This photograph is another from my series of Berkeley pictures that I’m only now able to reveal with improvements in noise reduction technology. The effect of seeing this “lost” image recovered has me wondering what other moments—
Eucalyptus Trails
Why save RAW camera outputs from (in this case) six years ago? Digital photography is a rapidly advancing field, and the advent of machine-learning-based noise reduction techniques has completely changed what sorts of images are salvageable. This lovely shot of Berkeley’s fire trails and tall (but invasive) eucalyptus trees stayed in the “unusable” pile for half a decade because I took it freehand, just after sunset, before I deployed my tripod—resulting in an ISO 4500 image from my old D7000 that was just too noisy. Topaz’s latest filters solved that and now this photo can take me back to my California sabbatical.
Los Angeles: A Blade Runner Morning
Though it may lack the verticality of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles in 2019, the cloudy skies and slightly sinister oranges put me in mind of the film’s iconic imagery.
Los Angeles River When Wet
While the L.A. River might be better known as the site of chase scenes in action movies when dry, the wet winter in California has turned it into a reflective ribbon through the grid.
Muscle Cars at Dawn in San Diego
Dawn makes for this dynamic moment when parts of a scene are thrown into dramatic sunlight while others still benefit from delicate, scattered, indirect light.
I like these shots for how the Ford Mustang and Dodge Charger are bathed in relatively gentle, flattering light, but headlights and sunlight make the rest of the scene comparatively high-contrast.
Sunrise in Southern California
High above the hills and mountains of Southern California, there is a moment, right around dawn, when the dark hues of earth and the reflected light from the lakes lets one image what the area looked like before human structures sprawled through the valleys.
A E S T H E T I C Rail
I’ve played with that 90’s vaporwave aesthetic in the past with aggressive color grading; on this particular San Diego dawn, those steps were hardly necessary. Palm trees and magenta hues do most of the hard work for themselves. I can hear the synths already…
Farms Amid the Dark Earth
A dawn flight from Palm Springs to Los Angeles (long story) passed over land that looked like potting soil—so muddy and fertile.
Decaseconds 