HDR Photography
I guess I’m still discovering new tricks up the DJI Mini 3 Pro’s sleeve. I’ve never managed to create a panorama (much less one looking up) from drone images before, but this massive shot of the sunset over the San Jacinto Mountains has changed all of that. The pink clouds arc above and the Empire Polo Club (home of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival) spreads across the foreground.
(You’ll definitely want to click through for full resolution on this one.)
Just before a snowstorm battered the northeast, we’ve escaped back to the desert. The rocks are craggy, the nights are weirdly cold, and there’s always a palm tree swaying in the distance.
Can you spot the tiny figures at the top of the hill? I’m confident that tiny figures produce a sense of grand scale in images—particular desert shots, like this one, where the inhuman nature of the place can make understanding the sizes of objects difficult. Nonetheless, I find myself wondering how small the figures in an image can be before the viewer loses the ability to recognize them as human.
Coachella Valley is a desert that was once home to a lake, so careful management of water—both where it should go, and where it shouldn’t—leads to some fascinating human-engineered structures. I like this image for the sense of depth, but also for the way that the unmodified hills rise above the human-produced forms in the fore- and mid-ground.
My favorite images are those that contrast (apparently) natural and human-populated places. Escaping all of the noise of the holidays to a hike in the desert has a certain appeal at this time of year.
Nothing makes the incredible scale of a western landscape apparent like some tiny people navigating the scene.
A sunset Christmas Eve drive through the less-inhabited parts of Coachella Valley has to end eventually. The palm trees mark the seconds of the drive back into town.
Brush and tire tracks in the North Palm Springs desert look extra-tiny beneath the enormous Christmas Eve clouds.
The Lake Cahuilla reservoir on the periphery of Coachella Valley makes a charming setting for early-evening fishing just before the park closes.
Apparently the original Lake Cahuilla was a prehistoric lake in the Coachella Valley; its modern recreation is a reservoir in the hills outside town. The relationship between humans and nature in the region is well-encapsulated by that point of comparison.
This mysterious small observatory outside Landers, California (not far from the Integratron) sticks out from the landscape—both figuratively and literally. Goings-on there strike me as excellent fodder for a science fiction novel.
Even without a full array of ancillary pillows, a spot to lounge by the pool on a cool desert evening seems like an enormous upgrade over the second half of winter in Northern New York.
An iconic image of renewable energy in California, if I do say so myself: scrub brush in the foreground, mountains in the background, and a huge wind turbine in the center of it all. I particularly like the way this particular shutter speed allowed for just a slight blur at the tips of the turbine blades.
At the northern end of Coachella Valley, civilization peters out and the wind kicks up. The seemingly endless fields of wind turbines are (unsurprisingly) well-positioned: hopping out of the car to get this shot, I was nearly knocked over by a grit-enhanced gust, the likes of which I’m not sure I’ve ever felt before.
Magenta-and-cyan “vaporwave” aesthetics go well with an Indio hot tub.
Decaseconds 