HDR Photography
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.
Runways on runways on runways, with the Rayleigh-scattering-induced silhouette of the Chicago skyline in the distance, on this summer morning over O’Hare International Airport.
Sections of Chicago’s hinterlands that were once stockyards and meatpacking facilities have long since been converted to serve as industrial parks, but the sense of an endless grid remains.
Night falls and the well-watered communities give way to desert landscapes on the outskirts of Coachella Valley.
I was back in California this week—sneaking some early-morning photography before the events of the 263rd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society began. The underside of the Harbor Drive Pedestrian Bridge reflected the sunrise and showed off the arc of its structure.
This view of Coit Tower and the western span of the Bay Bridge brought to you by the oddness of San Francisco zoning and real estate that prevent view-blocking high-rise construction. (Whether that’s a good thing is another question…)
My favorite William Gibson quote is, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” How we gauge futurity—or how we identify the traits we associate with future-ness—means that some places will have more “future” to them than others. A mountaintop in the Adirondacks might be pretty similar to its condition 100 years ago, while downtown Berkeley would be unrecognizable.
This image is a picture of the past, from the “future”: I wanted to print a tall, vertical image of Berkeley and the Bay but had (it turns out) never quite taken the one I wanted. I had taken the two pictures that went into making this image as part of a larger panorama in 2013 that never quite came out. Here in the present, I pulled in every technique in my arsenal—Adobe’s super resolution, Topaz AI noise reduction, frequency separation—to assemble two images from a circa-2010 16 MP Nikon D7000 into the 76 MP monster you see below. This one is definitely worth clicking through to full resolution.
Add a mile or so above the Mile High City and the sunset views are spectacular, even on clear winter nights.
Describing city streets as canyons is, at this point, a cliché, but that doesn’t mean that an image of San Francisco can’t be perfectly canyon-evoking.
Sunrise over Los Angeles and SoFi Stadium; time to say goodbye to 2021. See you in the new year!
The route over the mountains between San Diego and Palm Springs, CA 74, leads down this incredible twisting spiral of two-lane blacktop. Far in the distance, the twinkling lights of the desert valley await night travelers.
This image is another in a series of my re-processings of less-than-new RAW files with Photoshop’s “Super Resolution” machine learning algorithm. As in those other cases, the added impression of detail is particularly astonishing when viewed at full size after clicking through to the original image on Flickr.
Going back over some of my favorite images with “Super Resolution,” there’s no way I was going to skip a second shot at my image that first captured the “civilization gradient” from nature through suburbs to dense urbanity.
While the distant New Jersey countryside looks comparatively two-dimensional, the structure of Manhattan and Hoboken are so vertical.
Decaseconds 