HDR Photography
UBC’s Green College (shown here from another angle) is almost 100 years old, but when you’re inside it, the passage of time seems to stop. The heavy, wooden columns and beams seem to have been there forever. The trees are enormous, and enigmatic towers and cottages dot the interior, like the buildings of some alternate-reality castle.
Little pockets of calm exist all over Berkeley’s hustling campus, but Strawberry Creek on a rainy day is a particularly superlative example. The leaves and water take on this lovely green that perfectly offsets the red needles from the Redwoods above. Against this palette, the textures of the mud and roots are all the more striking.
Today’s photograph was taken by Piper Klemm (who has previously been on the other side of the camera), and really conveys the way quads and paths carved into the trees of Berkeley’s campus. The flow of students between classes gives the image the “campus” feel.
It’s sort of hard for me to believe upon revisiting this shot that it was taken on a college campus, or that beyond this stand of trees is a relatively well traveled street. This is just one of many things that struck me as awesome about UBC’s campus.
Tower cranes are, without question, the coolest pieces of modern construction equipment. In order to reach these heights, the cranes actually lift and build themselves! This particular crane is working on building the replacement to Campbell Hall (which we’ve previously photographed being demolished.) On this particular morning, the clouds aligned in just the right way with the arc of the crane and produced this composition.
Another from my series of photographs from UC Berkeley’s student machine shop: the autofeeder of a practically-antique milling machine. I love the gold colors from the machine’s recent work in cutting brass, and the was it smears into the other tones of steel and plastic.
It may be hard to imagine that a kid that grew up in and around Seattle then went to school in Bellingham never managed to make it up to visit Vancouver, BC but somehow this describes me. Not that I never made it to Canada, I visited Victoria, BC plenty of times in high school. Now having visited I’d estimate I missed out on a lot by not visiting sooner. In the Vancouver environs is the beautiful campus of the University of British Columbia which is really something. I’d say that UBC’s campus is, in many respects, precisely what a campus should be. Here’s a college campus which is incredibly close to major metropolitan area but which has somehow managed to completely surround itself with nature.
Pictured here is a shot in the late afternoon of one of the myriad of green spaces on campus, a rose garden perched atop a parking garage. What better way is there to hide an ugly, but necessary, facility than to cover it with something people want to look at? The view of the water and mountains beyond are just bonuses as far as I’m concerned.
Though I posted photographs taken in UC Berkeley’s machine shop before, I keep coming back to its complicated-but-calming tools and machines. The sense of decades-old purpose and function in this lathe sprouts from every scratch and dent.
During my time as a student at Berkeley, I’ve had a chance to watch Blum hall begin as a foundation and grow to this glowing glass-and-wood holocron you see here. It’s a beautiful building, and its modern architecture fits surprisingly well with the older buildings around it. Still, I have to wonder: given how small its footprint is, I have to wonder what the cost-per-square-foot of the space inside was?
Enormous. But oh-so worth it for the slightly sinister luminescence on winter nights. (I particularly like the manner in which the street lamps ring the building like matadors trying to keep its stampeding bulk contained.)
UCB’s Tolman Hall has a surprising number of urban legends surrounding its uniquely 1960’s appearance. The building is overcrowded and soon to be renovated, but I have to admit that it has a certain charm when the evening light bounces through concrete surfaces of its breezeway. The blues and greens of the shadowed campus and the golden sunset colors are appealing, to be sure, but it’s really the textures that I find so fascinating. The combination of precast and cast-in-place concrete means that there are at least four different textures here, each one reflecting and scattering light in its own, unique way.
Just around the corner from one of my favorite buildings, I found this spot where the curve of a footpath mirrors the curve of the passing road. The last moments of the day make for tiny beams of sunlight around my feet and tapping the tops of trees across the road. The start of summer is a perfect time in California.
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.
Decaseconds 