Dawn light illuminates the old Indio, California—a farming city of date plantations and strange water projects. In the distance, the oncoming scourge of sprawling subdivisions may signal the end of this particular era.
The Old Indio
Tag: dawn
Sunrise on L&G
The bright rooftops in the foreground are L&G Desert Store, a local grocery established in 1979, an ongoing representation of what Indio was during an earlier era, before it was encrusted with subdivisions.
Rebuilding the Palm Plantation
Early morning sees quiet at the old construction site, where this home at the site of an old palm plantation (which had fallen into disrepair) is being renovated. I love the chaos amid the grid of palms.
A “Nope” Cloud Over Coachella
A terrifying cloud (I swear, it makes sense) is the antagonist of “Nope,” and I saw echoes of that shape in this cloud above the San Jacinto Mountains and the Empire Polo Club.
Pre-Sunrise Hartford
A nearly winter morning marks the end of the semester. Light reflecting from the Connecticut River adds some energy to a monochromatic world and I head to work to submit final grades.
Vineyard in a Horseshoe
A whole vineyard is nestled into a horseshoe bend in the South Elkhorn Creek outside Midway, Kentucky.
Landscape Chunks, Textures, and Variations
The riotous multilayered landscapes of artists like Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck always fascinated me: how could so many different textures of farmland and hillside really coexist? Then I flew over Midway, Kentucky to see an array of fields that created exactly the same layer-upon-layer multitextured expanse.
Interstate Crosses South Elkhorn Creek
Morning light shines over Interstate 64 crossing South Elkhorn Creek in Midway, Kentucky.
Never So Glad to See Sunrise Over Spanish Mountains
After our redeye flight from Madrid to New York turned around halfway over the Atlantic due to mechanical issues, I’ve never been so happy to see sunrise on dry land.
Madrid Obligatorio
In December, our transatlantic flight to New York turning back near Greenland, spending hours in the air with an unknown mechanical error for returning us to the Madrid-Barajas Airport. After an all-too-brief but restless night in a mediocre Spanish hotel, we were back at the airport early the next morning for a second (and ultimately successful) attempt at an Atlantic crossing. Several hundred people waited to board. I looked out at the horizon; the landscape was strange, alien, surreal, but ultimately a lot more welcoming than the cold dark of the North Atlantic. The image will stay with me.
Cold Dawn Nucleation
There’s some sang about the photographer, not the camera, mattering to a great shot; while I appreciate the value of having the right tools, this sunrise image captured in a quick moment with my phone on a 1ºF morning provides some evidence to support the theory. The low temperatures quickly nucleated ice crystals from towers across the city and produced this dramatic array of miniature clouds.
Exam Dawn
Waking pre-dawn to be sure an NSF Major Research Instrumentation grant and a Statistical Mechanics exam are both finished when they need to be turns out to have some upsides—namely, this gigantic panorama of an incredible Hartford dawn. (This one is definitely worth clicking through to Flickr and further clicking to zoom to 100% scale.)
Balcony View in the Morning
A great delight of moving to Hartford was finding myself with morning views that excite and motivate me. Even when the sky itself is flat, the fog in the valley provides a smoothly varying topography to contrast the angular structure of the skyline.
Connecticut’s Marine Layer
This is a sight I haven’t seen since I lived in the Bay Area: a layer of low-lying clouds caused by a temperature inversion that look remarkably like the marine layer. Though I know the origins aren’t the same in the Central Valley of Connecticut, that mix of perfectly clear sky and rolling clouds brought me back in time and made rising at dawn worth it.
Sun Peaks Around the Mountain
Though I missed it when I originally processed them, I was entertained to look back at this pair of shots from early spring in Salisbury, Connecticut—one pointing northeast and the other pointing southeast. The light of the rising sun is visible in the distance in both directions where the shadow of the mountain over town is absent.
Decaseconds 