HDR Photography
A fair, complete with Ferris wheel, alongside the river in Portland Oregon is just the thing to post on the first day of the Spring Semester back at St. Lawrence University. As I trudged through snow to get down to business, the memories of warm sabbatical nights last year were inescapable.
Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, a massive X-ray laser sourced from a building-sized particle accelerator, was undergoing upgrades while I visited. Construction in the area added an mundane veneer to the superscience happening inside.
Beyond the bustle of the East Bay at rush hour, the preserved wooded hills of Strawberry Canyon seem so quiet.
Though St. Lawrence has its share of modern buildings (including my own), it’s the old part of campus (buildings like Piskor and Sykes Halls) that best captures the Harry Potter vibe of small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.
This is the blue hour; sunset is over. That soft, rosy hue in the far-off sky? The product of 100% anthropogenic light.
My favorite cities are those with borders artificially constrained by water (like San Francisco, Hong Kong, or Manhattan), usually leading to towering structures and high density. San Francisco’s situation was different for a long time; a subset of NIMBY residents (alongside an array of other economic factors) meant that this grid of smaller buildings persists, in spite of housing shortages and corresponding high housing prices. As this slowly changes and the city begins to warm to the idea of new development, this uniform grid of little buildings might someday shift.
Driving from San Francisco to Portland means passing Mt. Shasta. With the exposure shortened, the array of textures and shadows on the mountain’s snowy surface are revealed.
During the summer months, Tiburon’s Coninthian Yacht Clubs hosts the Friday Night Race Series. Though images from last week’s race are coming soon, I was most struck by this scene of a sailor on a trimaran watching the delicate blue-hour colors above San Francisco.
The Molecular Foundry’s enormous overhang looks alien up close, but the scale of the structure is really apparent with the lighting beneath the gravity-challenging bulk.
Some of the most magical photos come at the most unexpected times.
San Francisco’s verticality comes from its steep hills. Increasingly, however, that z-dimension size is being joined by towering additions to the skyline. Though I know it’s a contentious issue locally, I’m excited to see the new construction in downtown.
My past couple of posts have been images of San Francisco, foregrounded by nature and suburbs—the style I like to call a “civilization gradient”. This image similarly presents downtown Oakland, California, past the hilltop homes and Cal fields of Strawberry Canyon and through the invasive alien leaves of Berkeley Lab’s eucalyptus trees. The HDR processing techniques that Brendan and I use are perfect for settings like this, with an array of light intensities across a broad landscape.
I’ve had an attraction to Datsun Z cars since I read Wangan Midnight as a teenager and first encountered the “Devil Z”. Around the Bay Area, plenty of these cars are still running, and those that have survived this long come to resemble the style goals of their owners. That might be the “rough style” Z I photographed in Berkeley, or this super-clean example that was kind enough to park in the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco.
