HDR Photography
On those special nights, when ice crystals align correctly in the atmosphere, atmospheric optics get a bit crazy and a sun pillar like the one here appears.
Though, to be honest, even the Rayleigh scattering that makes the sky blue is crazy to begin with. The strange behavior of light and matter (thanks, Richard Feynman!) never ceases to amaze me.
I’ve always been fascinated by the American colloquialism of calling any feed store an elevator. (Though Canton does have a larger grain elevator of its own, as well.) When the sunset sky is at its most glorious, reality highlights the hyperutilitarian aesthetic of a working building: it has to be painted some color, so it might as well be post-war pastels.
I sometimes sift through the RAW files I took long in the past, searching for meaning in images I captured long ago. In the case of this particular photograph, there’s more to the image than just my favorite Bay Area gradient of differing environments (e.g. Oakland and San Francisco and Alcatraz and two different enormous bridges and so on): there’s also a feeling of place and moment. The dramatic clouds and the grasses and the hint of the Golden Gate’s span are all spectacular, but the optics of a raindrop spattered across the lens add just as much to the image. You can practically smell the petrichor in the air.
David Lynch brings an edge of dark menace to his films; I can still remember the first time I saw Blue Velvet and felt the crisp edge of real and unreal disintegrating. In particular, the director’s visions of Small Town America and the underbelly of that beast (in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, particularly) felt notable in “downtown” Canton last week. With the sky aflame and neon lights in every window, the scene was about 15 minutes away from some Lynch-level insanity.
When a warm breeze blows across a college campus at twilight, the already gorgeous buildings only become more (pardon the extensive use of cliché) romantic and magical. They tell me that this particular building contains a ghost, but it seems too warm and welcoming (a sort of half-scale college building) to be threatening. Perhaps it contains a friendly ghost?
In spring, some pastel pinks and blues are quite appropriate. This photograph is from my visit to Brendan’s normal stomping grounds, the shores of Puget Sound. The gentle summer sunset and the clusters of homes on the shoreline (and in the hills) made for a sight unlike anything I’d ever seen on the east coast.
On the shores of the Indian Ocean, muddy with silt washed down by seasonal thunderstorms, locals fish and tourists stroll. The mist and fog and spray make the scene extra-mysterious, but my favorite part was the enormous, shrub-encrusted sand dunes. Think of it as “Arrakis after the God Emperor,” to borrow from the imagery of Frank Herbert.
All of the other posts this week have been about surreal half-worlds of alienation and pensive detachment. I’d like Friday to be about something warmer, cheerier, and generally less dark: the concept of home. Without resorting to too much cliché, home can be in the shape of the windows or the parallel lines of painted floor boards, but it can also be seeing the same books in the bookcase that were there when you were a child. They were there then, and they’re still there now, and even if, “You can never go home,” you can always go back to the idea and the place and the books will be there.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, all was hopeful and “excellent.” When the Bay Bridge opened in 1936, human ingenuity could solve any problem, bridges replaced ferries, cars replaced horses, aircraft would soon replace trains. Now we’re orphans of the future, living in a world when “modernity” is in the past, and epic symbols of the era and its architecture are quickly becoming relics. Though I have no nostalgia for much of the social/cultural mores of the time period, I do find it fascinating to look upon the structures built “for the future” from the standpoint of that future. Perhaps it makes me wonder, just a bit, what we build for our own future now.
On a chill and cloudy afternoon, the sky hangs low over Berkeley and Oakland. Highly textured red tile roofs, ionic columns, industrial air handlers, all separated from the “mundane world” by a wall of trees: are these the “layers” of the Berkeley experience?
When my brother was in kindergarten, he made his fort in a small section of densely wooded area on our property. He called it, as any five-year-old would, “The Spooky Wood.” When the leaves fell, it lived up to its name. The tangle of fallen limbs and scarred trunks was impenetrable to all but him; he know the way through the cellulosic maze. Finding this mysterious shed with its epic light amid a North Country tangle, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my brother’s long-abandoned hideout.
Though it’s hours downstate from where George Lucas found his forest moon of Endor, Muir Woods packs the same enormous, wet redwood trees and lush vegetation that made the fictional planetoid so memorable. To have “spent” so much of my childhood wandering around on that other world (in my imagination), only to find myself really there, proved to be a spectacular treat at the end of my time in California.
Today is Friday and I couldn’t resist posting another shot—a total contrast (pardon the pun) from the last shot. I wanted something else to take me away from the rainy-day New York. Back in St. Lucia, South Africa, Volkswagens are ubiquitous. Though the look like relics of the 1980s, many of them are models still being produced today. It’s a different world, where the perfectly lightweight hot hatch heyday never ended.
In the rest of the world, it’s almost April, but in the North Country it still looks (and feels) like winter. The land and the people and the houses and the barns are battered by the weather, and when spring arrives we’ll repair and recover and regenerate.
Weaver finches are everywhere in South Africa, building their nests in any tall plant. Safety in numbers, however, pushes them to push their cellulosic hosts to their limits. Trees are completely filled with nests, the avian equivalent of an apartment complex.
Decaseconds 