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.
Tag: California
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.
Suburbs Up to the Wall
An early-morning flight out of Palm Springs airport paints gentle hues onto the massive wall that is Mt. San Jacinto. The orderly, be-palm-tree’d grid of the valley floor runs so sharply into the mountainside that I was immediately reminded that a sea once occupied the valley.
San Diego Runners
I last traveled to San Diego to present at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society—but while that meeting took place during the day, early morning was unaccounted-for time. I went exploring in the area around the San Diego Convention Center and found that most of my early-morning compatriots were runners.
In this quartet of images, I’ve captured a few of those runners in the dramatic early-morning California sunlight.
Dry Paths and Trails
Rain brings spontaneous desert symmetry breaking: some areas become rivers and streams, while others stay high and dry. La Quinta Cove brings hiking trails into this equation. Looking high over the landscape, those trails and dry streambeds may be hard to distinguish—until the rain comes. In the distance, just above the tan tanks on the left of the image, the Salton Sea serves as a reminder of how water and the desert interact.
Hill Structure
My trips to this hill last year were constrained by the limitations of gravity; bringing my drone with me this year opened up whole new vistas and geometries. The artificial nature of this water retention area is far more apparent when view from the air.
Where the Houses Stop/Palm Trees and Sprawl
Like a child’s legos, spilled out onto the floor until they reach the wall of the room, the sprawl of Coachella Valley reaches from one mountain range to the other.
Of course, when that sprawl does reach the edge, modern California’s land conservation kicks in and a hard barrier appears between homes and desert.
Christmas Sunset Together
Today marks the start of the spring semester at many colleges and universities. A wistful look back at winter break and its associated festivities seemed appropriate.
Trio vs. Trio
I found myself returning to one of my earliest Decaseconds posts (almost exactly 11 years ago) as I updated my Top 32 album on Flickr—the digital portfolio where I display my best (or simply favorite) photographs. Finding “Waves and Rocks Dwarf Man” in that set, I saw both the excellent light and composition that my old Nikon had captured in 2011, as well as all of the places where my choices in processing the original image now left my unsatisfied. Rather than simply reprocessing that original image, I went back to the folder of camera raws from that day and selected an image I took just moments later to tackle. (Always keep save those raw files!) I not only like this composition better than the older one, but I also feel that I have brought something new out here, rather than simply reprocessing something old.
At the Top
Making it up to a good view in time to catch some sunset colors is great in any area, of course, but the open nature of desert landscapes means that at least I won’t miss the colors if I don’t make it all the way there.
Hills Beyond
This grand desert setting has a tiny bonus: can you spot the tiny walker in the foreground?
Decaseconds 