HDR Photography
The move to Hartford has offered me the opportunity to capture this time sequence (like the ones I took in Kentucky and the North Country) with a dramatic view of Travelers Tower over the course of a day. If the image appeals, it’s also available as a dynamic wallpaper for macOS that will change your desktop with the time of day.
04:30
04:52
05:10
11:32
14:11
16:33
17:31
18:51
19:25
19:40
20:00
20:36
23:46
Though it may lack the verticality of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles in 2019, the cloudy skies and slightly sinister oranges put me in mind of the film’s iconic imagery.
With so many tall, vertically oriented structures in a city, it’s probably no surprise that some of them should fall into pleasing alignment with one another. The modest glow of sunrise light through the gap between the clocktower and the adjacent building provides a friendly spark to guide the eye to the center of this image.
In this second case, it’s harsher Sun, rather than palm trees and clock towers, that has found its way into a special alignment through the streets of San Diego. Bright light falls into this canyon that should otherwise be dawn dim.
While the L.A. River might be better known as the site of chase scenes in action movies when dry, the wet winter in California has turned it into a reflective ribbon through the grid.
Dawn makes for this dynamic moment when parts of a scene are thrown into dramatic sunlight while others still benefit from delicate, scattered, indirect light.
I like these shots for how the Ford Mustang and Dodge Charger are bathed in relatively gentle, flattering light, but headlights and sunlight make the rest of the scene comparatively high-contrast.
An early-morning flight out of Palm Springs airport paints gentle hues onto the massive wall that is Mt. San Jacinto. The orderly, be-palm-tree’d grid of the valley floor runs so sharply into the mountainside that I was immediately reminded that a sea once occupied the valley.
I last traveled to San Diego to present at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society—but while that meeting took place during the day, early morning was unaccounted-for time. I went exploring in the area around the San Diego Convention Center and found that most of my early-morning compatriots were runners.
In this quartet of images, I’ve captured a few of those runners in the dramatic early-morning California sunlight.
Summer dawns are calm, gentle times in Midway, Kentucky—and when we’re in town for horse shows, you can bet we see a lot of them. I find it satisfying that the aerial view is just as relaxing and bucolic.
Sunrise over northern Kentucky, when captured from a drone, seems to present layers on layers (creek/patio/driveways/vines/forest/interstate/forest/sky) that look like an ukiyo-e print.
Good news, everyone! A new, much-lighter, yet equally capable drone (the DJI Mini 3 Pro) means aerial photography while traveling in a way that was never possible with my chunky Phantom 3.
In today’s image, northern Kentucky presents a classic American combination: old barns and farms, crossed by the monolithic expanse of the Interstate system.
Strange sunlight geometries at dawn make for rare reflections on the hull of this ship.
I was back in California this week—sneaking some early-morning photography before the events of the 263rd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society began. The underside of the Harbor Drive Pedestrian Bridge reflected the sunrise and showed off the arc of its structure.
Sunrise over Los Angeles and SoFi Stadium; time to say goodbye to 2021. See you in the new year!
In the weirder hills of the Bay Area, back yard detritus falls alongside stones pulled into position by ancient glaciers.
Dawn in Napa brings the kinds of landscapes, with layer upon layer of hills and fields and trees, that I associate with prints of impressionist oil paintings scattered around the average home in the late twentieth century.
Decaseconds 