HDR Photography
The eternally-damp shoreline of the San Francisco Bay is the fascinating meeting of quaint docks and maritime randomness with the aggressive mass of a full-scale city. Charming piers abut the grandiosity of the Financial District, and the result is a surreal and unique setting. Amid this hubbub, the Coit Tower and the Embarcadero stand out as red beacons.
The Cathedral of learning is just as dramatic on the outside as the inside. The Neo-Gothic lines and the oppressive cloud cover of an oncoming thunderstorm make for a feeling of significant foreboding. I can’t help but imagine that the building was designed for some sinister, supernatural purpose, and that we might need to call in some experts to fix it.
On the rocks of Grizzly Peak, nothing resets your soul like seeing the hills and trees towering above the hazy sprawl of Oakland.
Looking down over an intersection in the dead of night reminds me of staring at a moment without time. No cars, no one rushing in and out of the coffee shop. Everything is still. The perfect subject, then, for a photograph.
As shot from Pier 14, Coit Tower stands atop Telegraph Hill. Its white surface, in conjunction with colored lights, make it absolutely stunning to see at night. Such surreal objects can lack a suitable sense of scale when photographed. This photograph satisfies me so in large part because the homes clustering the hill provide that scale, and a sense of the familiar to match the alien.
Just around the corner in my neighborhood, across the parking lot of the Energy Biosciences Building, is this little slice of Downtown Berkeley neighborhood. The mixture of tacky, earthquake-proofed 1960s architecture, charming older apartment buildings, abandoned structures, and sprinkling of trees make it home.
Orange and blue may be the most overdone color combination for movie posters, but I’m more tolerant of the hues when when they spring natively from the night sky and the sodium lamps of a city. Something about the stone textures of big buildings really appeals to me.
(And if you look carefully, you can see Brendan, my fellow photographer, in the bottom of the picture.)
Climbing Telegraph Hill on foot means stairs. Lots and lots of stairs.
Climbing Telegraph Hill by car means loops. Lots and lots of loops.
(Though I’m sure my memory is exaggerating.) On that winding road through the trees and stones, under the watchful eyes of the wild parrots, are occasional glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge. With the last wisps of sunlight landing on the hill, the craggily texture of the tarmac and the rocks and trees contrast so perfectly the with the far-off Platonic idealism of that bridge.
Sometimes, the most glorious visions are right around the corner. Great clouds and just the right light can be frustratingly rare in California, land of infinite sunshine, so I was utterly thrilled to capture this gorgeous post-sunset cloudscape and the attendant Friday-evening bustle from the Berkeleyites stuck down on Earth.
The water practically glows with reflected light. The buildings tower over the scene. The long exposure captures the trails of aircraft in the night sky. San Francisco’s waterfront along the Embarcadero may not have the most enormous and prestigious structures, but nights like this make that irrelevant. The scene makes “enigmatic” and “cyberpunky” into something almost friendly. (Or at least inviting.)
High atop it all is that fascinating golden penthouse structure. The visual similarity to a treasure chest must be more than coincidence.
For every bustling San Francisco street, there’s a quiet alleyway like this one. The details of the setting at sunset really jump out: the cracked concrete and lumpy pavement, the intricate fire escapes and the peeling paint. Ninja Turtles are coming out of that manhole cover at any moment.
San Francisco features this incredibly rapid transition from enormous, modernist towers to older, mostly wooden structures. This transition seems to be located, at least partially, along the divides between the flat portions of the city and the truly, insanely steep bits. Today’s photograph shows the full gradient between the two zones. I particularly like the two tiny figures, sitting on the steps, in the bottom right corner of the image. This tiny detail provides a little bit of a human element to an otherwise dehumanizing scale. They seem to be silent observers, casually taking in the flow of traffic as the sun’s last photons scatter through the atmosphere.
On a recent outing to San Francisco I captured this shot of the these trees in the financial district. The red color and the way the lights were strung around the trees in a swirling pattern lead to a sense of motion, as if the trees have been set on fire. Its a very interesting effect which contrasted with the cooler colors of a nearby set of trees similarly illuminated but bathed in blue, not red.
Flying high above Brazil, I got a feel for the strange contrasts of the country. Over the interior, I saw mostly mountainous jungle and farmland; as we neared the coast (as in today’s shot), I got to see more of the urban side of modern Brazil. In the southern part of Brazil, where the climate is Mediterranean (much like California), the same pattern of “intense urbanization adjacent to vegetation-carpeted hills” seems to predominate.
With the sun setting behind me into the Pacific, the light on the Golden Gate Bridge, the city, and the Bay Bridge beyond it (thus the sandwich effect) begins to shift from golden to deep blue. The lights came on just as the rain started to spit, and the whole scene made me wish I’d brought a thermos of hot chocolate with me.
Decaseconds 