HDR Photography
“Lights so bright they turn night into day!” Vernon Street, home of the Greek organizations of Trinity College, is a place where the time and the activities rarely seem correlated. On a night during the summer, however, the world was quiet and empty.
My last visit to Trinity was a great chance to see all of the Harry-Potter-esque buildings on campus. Their mass and majesty can be a bit overwhelming—so impacting the senses that I wouldn’t be surprised if I perceived a boy flying past on a broomstick.
Sculpture installation in the reflecting pool on the Hearst mining circle on UC Berkeley’s campus.
Berkeley is a pretty surreal place; as I process that, I thought my 400th post on Decaseconds might be a great time to really show it. The yellows of the birch tree are so sharp on a foggy fall morning, amid the hard, stained concrete of the past and the high-tech Li Ka Shing Building (one of my first-ever posts) materials. Visual contrast, both literal and metaphorical, align with the conceptual contrast of a place that prides itself on being countercultural while also being the birthplace of many of the technologies and ideas that make our modern culture possible.
On Mother’s Day, the North Country feels alive and warm and breezy. Smells of vegetation and fresh earth and coniferous trees flood the air. A panorama of life restored to campus (even as it quiets down for the end of the school year) seemed highly appropriate.
On a chill and cloudy afternoon, the sky hangs low over Berkeley and Oakland. Highly textured red tile roofs, ionic columns, industrial air handlers, all separated from the “mundane world” by a wall of trees: are these the “layers” of the Berkeley experience?
This was a sight, descending the steps to the courtyard of Latimer Hall, that was once everyday and pedantic to me. Now, the sight of it is a powerfully nostalgic mix of strange perspectives and a dozen mishmashed textures and patterns: tiles and bricks and precast and cast-in-place and trees and bushes. In the long run, that red-green-and-gray color scheme means a lot more to me than I thought it did.
Having recently finished the fantastic Bioshock Infinite, I’ve had images of early-twentieth-century American exceptionalism floating through my brain. No matter what you think of the (sometimes questionable) policy decisions based on such a policy, the iconography is undeniably seductive. Neoclassical design features and waving flags on a crisp Sunday afternoon! Though this moment on St. Lawrence’s campus might not be literally of that time, the spirit of it was overwhelming.
After a (relatively) warm weekend, the North Country is set to be entombed once again in winter. Though we’ve been promised by the false weather prophets that this cold spell won’t match the ferocity of January’s efforts, I can’t help but think back to mornings of almost unreal atmospheric thermal energy. On the edge of St. Lawrence’s campus, the sky was clear and the sun rose and cars puttered to work as though everything was normal.
I’ve posted before on the strange properties of Berkeley and the Bay Area: the condensation of nature and suburb and weird architecture and intensity urbanity that compresses human interest and life into a tiny area. This high-density material seems to deform the very fabric of space a time, and make the distance of a few miles seem like a light year and the time of a decade seem mere moments. This photograph captures the folding and crinkling as it happens: crunch clouds, sharp trees, an array of buildings from multiple Berkeley colleges within the University, the stretch of Telegraph Ave. and the tiny shapes of Oakland (at the far right) in the distance.
Bit by bit, my memories of Berkeley are vanishing. I can justify that this phenomenon is, at worst, neutral: the daily grind and the stupid time I missed the bus vanish, and only the weekends watching the sunset from the Berkeley Hills remain. Not to be trite: this empty, early-morning, fog-shrouded, post-apocalyptic view of the campanile is now my memory of the place, as well as an operational metaphor for that memory… If that’s not too obtuse.
Taking a temporary aside from Africa (and the warm/rainy weather of weird northern New York), here’s an image from the Zen garden just after the most recent blizzard. I haven’t done much work in black and white photography since high school, but this was a case of contrasting textures and tones that just demanded it. The rough, dark brick and stone dressed by puffy snow seemed poetic almost to the point of (again) cliché—so I went with it.
Today has been swamped under constant, freezing barrage of rain that carries dreariness in every drop. I prefer to remember the campus as it was in the last moments of aumtun, when one last sunset blazed through the crisp air.
A “casual blizzard” hit the North Country this weekend, and after I excavated around the house, I went exploring. St. Lawrence’s Zen garden was looking particularly peaceful under its (pardon the cliché) blanket of snow. The tiny structures seem to amplify the effect.
This one’s a little different, here I was playing around with a pinhole on my Canon T3i. This is actually a manually measured 3 shot HDR pinhole photo of a bridge on Cal’s campus. Composing this shot was a bit of a challenge as really the only way to judge composition is to take a long exposure (in this case not that long with the help of very high ISO settings). Processing it was also a bit of a challenge as the amount of change in the lighting over the duration of the three exposures created really weird looking highlights. Still, the peculiar kind of “lo-fi” quality is neat, and I’ve been experimenting with landscapes where the reduction in detail is less noticeable.
Decaseconds 