Rain brings spontaneous desert symmetry breaking: some areas become rivers and streams, while others stay high and dry. La Quinta Cove brings hiking trails into this equation. Looking high over the landscape, those trails and dry streambeds may be hard to distinguish—until the rain comes. In the distance, just above the tan tanks on the left of the image, the Salton Sea serves as a reminder of how water and the desert interact.
Tag: Dusk
Horses at Home
Where the Houses Stop/Palm Trees and Sprawl
Like a child’s legos, spilled out onto the floor until they reach the wall of the room, the sprawl of Coachella Valley reaches from one mountain range to the other.
Of course, when that sprawl does reach the edge, modern California’s land conservation kicks in and a hard barrier appears between homes and desert.
Night Arrives Above Empire Polo Club
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.)
Three Views of Canton, New York
I upload pictures to be future Decaseconds posts as I find images I think are worthy. (Only the best for my readers.) During most of the year, a three-photographs-per-week pace keeps up with my new acquisitions. This fall, however, was a time of plenty, powered by my DJI Mini 3 Pro’s incredible range and low-light image quality. To keep up with demand necessitates a triple-play today.
Three views of Canton, New York begin with this image over the Grasse River, with islands in the foreground and SUNY Canton in the distance.
Farther south, St. Lawrence University’s campus is lit up for the evening.
And the quad by Kirk Douglas Hall looks warm and inviting. (It’s currently beneath a layer snow.)
Water Escape: Coachella Valley
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.
County Buildings
Palms Back Into Town
Main Street Lights in Canton, New York
Route 11, the main road connecting the whole North Country (we don’t have any Interstates), runs through a series of quaint downtowns, where it temporarily becomes Main St. The impressive stability of the DJI Mini 3 Pro meant that I could capture long, smooth light trails from headlights and taillights representing the evening’s traffic.
Lights of the Ready Campus
I’ll be teaching my first class of the Fall 2022 semester tomorrow morning, so today seemed like the perfect day to reflect on the campus to which I’m returning. The structures amidst the trees sure look good from 100 meters up.
This image also brings up an interesting note on aspect ratios: Since the start of Decaseconds, I’ve largely been formatting my very favorite images in a 1.6:1 (i.e., 16:10) aspect ratio, such that they’d function well as desktops for my various MacBook Pro laptops. The advent of the “notch” and associated added screen real estate means that new MBPs have a 1.547:1 ratio—and thus my favorite images (like this one) are arriving with a new aspect ratio.
After the Vineyard Concert
Last Moments of Thanksgiving Sun
I’ve developed some odd tradition for epic landscape photography at the end of major holidays (as in this Christmas image)—perhaps it’s something about wanting the day to last forever.