HDR Photography
Sacré-Cœur sits high on a hill above Paris, and from the top of Tour Montparnasse (Sacré-Cœur architectural polar opposite), the view shows off so many of the city’s famous structures simultaneously: the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, the Palais Garnier.
On this bright Sunday morning, I finally photographed the mighty Manhattan skyline from high above its (mostly) rectilinear grid. This is my favorite kind of photograph: The expanse of cloud-dappled space stretches all the way to tree-covered hills at the horizon and the cityscape seems to offer infinite detail down at the level of individual windows.
As busy as the cities of the Bay Area become, there are the spaces in the fire trails (like the one in the foreground) to get some quiet and distance. There’s an odd orthogonality of the senses in being able to see all of the commotion below with none of the accompanying sound.
Two of my past St. Lawrence University students are working on their Ph.D.s at Berkeley and I discovered yesterday that one was giving her Graduate Research Conference (Berkeley’s version of a thesis defense, but earlier) while the other was in the audience. I’m very proud of both of them.
Understandably, this had me thinking about my experiences at Berkeley. In this picture from Grizzly Peak, the perspective folds together Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley. In the foreground, look at those gnarled trees—they’re weird but they’ve grown tall. I’ll take that visual metaphor for the grad school experience. I took this picture on Christmas Day in 2016, so I guess that makes these Christmas trees, too.
My favorite part of a huge cityscape view is the way the tiny details of buildings (windows, lights, roofs) slowly become less and less distinct as you look farther away. I was inspired to get a “real” camera all those years ago in part from a desire to takes pictures that gave the viewer a feeling of being able to “zoom forever” and always see more detail.
I caught John Wick Chapter 3 in theaters this weekend; that movie’s take on New York City inspired me to finish processing my RAWs from my October 2018 trip to photograph its downtown skyline. Perhaps that sense of a hidden world lurking around every corner is captured in the details along the shore.
Look at all those taillights! When it’s time to go, it’s time to go.
Lovely, gentle dusk colors—pinks and magentas and purples and aquas—settle over San Francisco and the Marin Headlands, but it barely touches the bright red (technically International Orange) of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Sutro Tower has a Neo-Tokyo style at any time of day, but a hazy orange sunset adds a layer of Blade Runner/Cyberpunk 2077 style to the overwatching structure.
I took this picture two years ago, during a wonderful springtime in Berkeley when a rainy winter had made the hills lush and green. The view is enormous, overwhelming: Oakland, San Francisco, Emeryville, and Berkeley all packed into one. I like the contrast of the tiny path on the green hilltop on the left side of the image providing a quiet contrast.
There are perfect days in the hills above Berkeley, and they happen a lot more frequently in the spring.
New York has something for everyone (perhaps even the nature lover in Central Park); it feels at times like a Swiss Army knife of a city. When I took this panorama originally, it was so large that it didn’t fit well as a single image. Collapsing the picture to a “tiny planet” stereographic projection, the image now looks literally like those images of a Swiss Army knife, opened to show all of its different components.
The density of Manhattan’s skyline makes me appreciate the political will required to preserve public open spaces in urban areas. A visit to Liberty State Park makes for a delightful break from the “concrete jungle”.
Among the Lutetian limestone structures of Paris, the golden dome of Les Invalides glows at the moment of sunset. Before its illumination activates, I’m not sure the Tour Eiffel can match it.
Downtown Manhattan eventually ends, giving way to Brooklyn in the distance under the rising moon. I took this picture at the end of a weekend trip, just before heading back home; there was an appropriate symmetry to a sunset skyline marking the finale of a New York trip.
Decaseconds 
