HDR Photography
The marine layer rolls in to blanket San Francisco in damp cold during summer evenings. My favorite part of this image is the way the Bay Bridge and the bayside buildings are highlighted by that rolling cloud bank. In just a few minutes more, the whole city was covered.
So many of my summer pictures in from the Bay Area face downwards because the skies are either clear or marine-layer-obscured. This was one of the rare evenings with an amazing sky of deep blues and magentas above the Berkeley Hills.
Even in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, there has to be a place to store the equipment that makes everything run. In the foreground of this view from Berkeley Lab’s Building 62 are the shipping containers and assorted equipment used by the physical plant to keep the lab running. I’ve always found the contradiction—using very expensive land to store mundane objects—to be an engaging one. Of course, if all of the land were employed for its “valuable” use and the practical aspects were neglected, the result would be that the land would cease to be valuable.
Behind San Francisco are clouds both natural (horizontal) and the product of human craft (the vertical spiral).
It’s said to be one of the nicest parts of the AT. With spectacular views from the tops of the balds along this section of the trail, I can see why.
Small-town America seems even smaller in the face of an epic sunset and the thunderstorm it presaged.
California summer: Blue skies (no clouds), dry grass.
California winter: Complicated skies (crazy clouds), lush grass.
Looking across the verdant hills of Berkeley Lab to San Francisco, it’s not hard to see why I prefer the winter months in California.
Utah may be famous for its skiing (particularly in the region around Park City), but that makes for an enormous number of odd mountain features in the summer. For such unforgiving terrain, humans have made many changes to the area.
Great expanses of Nevada’s winter landscape look smooth and round: rolling hills and puffy clouds.
Then the landscape tucks in around the Interstate, the chunky details are more apparent. That little fence in the foreground is thoroughly dwarfed by the not-so-distant towers of rock.
Above the city are layers on layers of different air, varying in composition, temperature, and thus density. At sunset, that makes for lots of scattering and color.
It’s a pretty weird sensation to leave home where’s in the mid-80’s and sunny in the morning and end your day in the snow… in June.
Bay Area sunsets shift to the north in summer, where they’re best seen from the houses of the Berkeley Hills. There’s something delightfully Californian about a German sports car parked in front of a mid-century modern home on a ridiculously-graded road.
Decaseconds 