HDR Photography
Today’s shot is one of my earlier attempts at HDR; I really like the composition of dark, absolute trees against the dappled sunlight, but with the benefit of time… Well, there are a variety of changes I’d have made in both the shot I took and the post-processing that followed. Reflecting on my past can be quite the learning experience–I’d like to think I’m more critical of my own work than anyone else’s.
It’s amazing how quickly Campbell hall (previously featured in various stages of its deconstruction here and here) has been reduced to a pile or rubble. Just this past week they have completed the demolition but I was able to capture this shot, with the Campanile in the background, just before it stopped looking like a building and started looking like a pile of rubble.
Berkeley’s campus becomes oddly, frighteningly empty during the late spring. By the time summer rolls around, more students return to attend summer classes and the campus runs on a skeleton crew. In the time between the end of final exams and the start of the summer semester, however, only professors and graduate students dare to roam the halls. In this context, the enormous (but now mostly-empty) buildings remind me of the decaying palaces of some deposed monarch. School is dead! Long live school!
There’s something about a (relatively) simple wooden bridge over a wee creek that shouts, “SUMMER!” Given that today is the “unofficial first day of summer” (pools open today in much of the country, etc.), it seemed appropriate to feature something so summer-centric.
We’ve all seen desire paths before, but it wasn’t until recently that I knew their name. They occur in places where the constructed landscaping and walkways don’t reflect the routes people actually want to take. It might be a result of my background as an academic, but I’ve found them to be most ubiquitous at colleges and universities, where designers aren’t always cognizant of the hurry and crowding that results when thousands of students all attempt to change classes simultaneously. (I should probably be proud that a redesign of one of the quads at my alma mater is actually taking previously-developed desire paths into account in its new geometry.)
Today’s shot comes from outside the Valley Life Sciences Building at UC Berkeley; at each corner of the building, the name of one of the life sciences appears in the stonework. I didn’t plan it this way, but was happy to see that the “Psychology” corner was visible over the desire paths: the cause hovering over the effect.
(Or perhaps I should call it the Crushinator?) You may recognize today’s shot from Campbell Hall’s time as a mummy, but yesterday the reaper finally came for the building. I have to admit to my own exhilaration as I watched them slice and tear through the acres of rebar; of course, everyone in the crowd was watching through their cell phones as they snapped pictures. There’s something hypnotic in watching the end of something that seemed to permanent.
UC Berkeley has an enormous number of greenhouses just to the west of their main campus. The glow from inside them at night fit nicely with the streetlights reflecting off the low cloud cover on this particular night.
These little alcoves on Berkeley’s campus are apparently great places to study. At night, in particular, their lighting makes for some fairly spectacular effects. This is the same area where Brendan found that great shot of the chessboard yesterday, and I thought it might be nice to show a broader view, too.
I recently had a chance to shoot the new Li Ka Shing Center. Brand-new buildings are so free of the dirt and grime endemic of everything else in a city; they always have this surreal quality, like something from a video game. I was particularly entranced by the texture of the sheathing laid over the densglass that comprises the building’s shell.
Welcome to Decaseconds, a photography blog where Brendan and I display our latest photographs. Though we’ll be posting all kinds of images here, we have a mutual interest in long-exposure and HDR (high dynamic range) landscape photography. That will be our focus.
UC Berkeley’s Campbell Hall is currently undergoing demolition that has resulted in the mummification of the building; the glow from within made a fantastic counterpoint to the light reflected from the overcast sky.
Decaseconds 