HDR Photography
Drones open up all kinds of new perspectives, but these vantages don’t always have to be extreme or dramatic. The equivalent height of an aerial work platform presents just the correct geometry to get these rays from the setting sun to explode from the roof of a recently renovated barn outside Lexington, Kentucky.
Radiant summer sunset light showered over a rustic farm is all well and good, but a relaxed pony munching grass in the foreground really draws the eye to what matters.
Our summer rental cottage in rural(ish) Kentucky provides my wife’s favorite benefit: waking up to horses in the back yard. There’s no better coffee companion than an equine friend.
Traveling southeast into the expanse of Coachella Valley, more and more of the regions farms still remain.
Though suburban sprawl may eventually make its way down here, “California rural” remains for now.
High-end homes nestle between groves of date trees.
The solar array from last week’s post can just be seen between the trees near the medium-sized pond in the center of today’s picture. This image provides a much better feel for the homestead setting and the love autumn colors decorating it.
The white heifer in this herd already stands out, but then she was polite enough to be the only one with her head fully up when I stopped to snap a sunset shot.
If you zoom all the way in, there are tiny goats in the fields between the power lines. They convey a pretty mind-boggling sense of just how big those lines are.
Hayao Miyazaki’s films are notable for these beautiful landscape/establishing shots of windswept grassy hillsides beneath huge cumulus clouds. The gentle, rolling limestone hills of northern Kentucky, with some cows grazing quietly in the distance, made me feel like I was in a Miyazakiesque setting.
Given that most of my research is focused on renewable energy, I love to pick up relevant pictures to include in my presentations. This solar facility outside Denver, CO, was far larger than an initial glance at the image might imply. The tiny yellow dots at the base of the cylinders in the center of the image are enormous pieces of earthmoving equipment.
Albion College’s Equestrian Center sits on 340 acres near the outskirts of campus. In addition to fields and paddocks, the manor house of the land’s previous inhabitants sits on a nearby hill, overlooking the goings-on.
The facility has a lot of hay storage.
Inside the facility, the region’s Pony Clubs were holding a rally. This particular pony looks pretty surprised to be finding themselves in the wash stall.
The background of this image—fleets of golf carts, tons of bedding, parking lots of trucks and horse trailers, plus busy grooms and working students—is a good reminder of the effort that goes into the equestrian experience happening in the foreground.
A summer sunrise accompanies many breakfasts when horses are involved, but I have to admit that I prefer mine with less grass and more eggs.
Sharing a sunrise breakfast with ponies is an experience I highly recommend.
Even with advanced warning, I wasn’t really ready for the eerie gradients of cloudless central Oregon sunsets in the summer; they remind me of those rover-captured images of sunsets on Mars.
The enormous Margaux Farm seems, like some equestrian Jurassic Park, to stretch from one horizon to the other.
Decaseconds 