HDR Photography
Drone panoramas have really opened up the kinds of images I can capture with a light, fixed-focal-length-lens drone like the DJI Mini 3 Pro.
These panoramas from Coachella Valley, covering the Trilogy subdivision and its adjacent golf course, capture a dramatic expanse of sky and wet, reflective surfaces following a rare rainstorm.
Welcoming in 2024 with a ride off into the sunset for 2023. A massive rainstorm in the Coachella Valley turned the roads into pools that reflected the last hints of sunset to form a golden path.
Definitely click through to Flickr for the full-resolution detail on this panorama covering the approach of the Palms to Pines Scenic Byway into Palm Springs.
Days of rain covered Coachella Valley in mud, but the clouds broke in time for a Christmas morning hike at the La Quinta Cove trailhead. Out in the misty distance is the Salton Sea.
Bombay Beach‘s beach keeps expanding as the Salton Sea dries back to where it was at the start of the twentieth century, making for an enormous span to match the enormous arc of sky above.
Like a full-time Burning Man, Bombay Beach shifted from its origins as a sort of “California Riviera” in the 1950s to something with more the feel of an artists’ colony. The town’s little grid of streets amid the emptiness of the desert valley brings to mind open-world video game maps, but the eclectic nature of the beach itself makes reality (as usual) far more interesting.
Some kind of teleportation accident seems as likely an explanation as any other for how a swing set wound up in the middle of a lake.
The human-made swing set structure is alone against the huge scale of the Salton Sea, mountains, and sunset beyond. (Excepting, of course, that the Salton Sea is itself effectively human-made.)
This shadow-of-a-hypercube sculpture is pretty enormous, but the sense of space and structure changes when view from a drone floating above.
This car/plane sculpture at Bombay Beach looks either very ready or very unready to head off into the sunset—but I can’t figure out which.
Does any combination more satirically capture the American experience than an SUV and an Airstream trailer traversing the empty wasteland resulting from an ecological disaster?
Drone photography geometry exercise: a tetrahedron in profile collapses into a triangle, then reflection doubles it into a diamond.
AI-generated images have perhaps made us so inured to impossible images as to dilute the shocking impact of the truly surreal. Bombay Beach’s sculptures, planted in the shores of the Salton Sea, “floating” in the sky, truly look like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
A big panorama of Empire Polo Club helps one to understand a bit how this site can hold both Coachella and Stagecoach.
Winter days in the desert are short enough already, but the tall San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains cut the light off even sooner. High up with a drone, there are still some final rays to be harvested.
Decaseconds 