HDR Photography
The colors in Brazil were incredibly intense; the oversaturated blues and greens are just inescapable. Even in winter, everything is lush. But here, at the elegant, 1960s pool bar, the season is more obvious. There’s no way a scene this gorgeous would be so eerily abandoned at the height of summer.
This bucolic hillside in Corvallis, OR is a special sight. In the rolling heartland of the state, the grass seed harvest happens for only a couple of weeks out of the whole year. I’ve previously posted other shots from the broad hills and valleys of this area, but I particularly like the interplay between the orange of the sky and the pink of the clouds as sunset creeps in.
In the evenings San Francisco’s Coit tower is illuminated creating a pretty spectacular effect.
This weekend, I finally conquered a serious challenge: organizing my ancient photo collection. As I went through it, I found some photographs from almost a decade ago. Unfortunately, they weren’t taken with a DSLR, but I’m presenting them here as a taste of compositions, colors, and places that aren’t otherwise found on Decaseconds that frequently. With no further ado:
This is the creek, behind my childhood home, where I spent countless hours building castles, bridges, and walls from sticks and stones. The water comes from the top of nearby Mt. Riga, and is icy cold through most of the year. Somehow, we still managed to handle swimming in it during the summer.
This picture shows the Long Walk of Trinity College in Hartford, CT. This is the oldest part of the school, built when the campus moved to its current location in 1863. This particular day at the end of November was the first snow of the year. Everyone is just a bit surprised, the leaves are still on the trees, and the snow seems wetter than at any other time.
This photograph was taken at the top of Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire. Though the top of the mountain is barren but for a few shrubs, it turns out that this isn’t because of being above the tree line. Over the course of centuries, the mountain was repeatedly burned, both to make room for livestock and because wolves were living in its caves. Now, just a handful of berry bushes and grasses crust the smooth, ancient stone of the mountain. Some have called it, “the Most Hiked Mountain in America.”
Finally, I have a picture from Key West, Florida. The sunsets and the enormous thunderheads there make for some lovely pictures, but my favorite detail is at the horizon: the poles supporting power lines, alone in the water, bringing electricity from key to key.
The beach at Costão do Santinho is as bright as day, 24/7. In the winter, it was eerily empty (save for a few roaming packs of wild dogs, later on…) I’d like to imagine that the warmer weather brings all-night volleyball tournaments.
Either way, the mist-capped waves, black rocks, and bright bits of algae make the lonely beach even more alien.
It’s undeniable that behind the Golden Gate bridge and Alcatraz the Transamerica Pyramid is one of the most recognizable features of the San Francisco skyline. Everyone’s used to the view of it embedded in the skyline but it looks completely different when viewed from the base, a less common perspective. It actually gives the impression of exaggerated perspective when viewed from the street beneath it, sort of like it disappears into infinity.
OK, so not a real spaceship but it does sort of look like something out of an episode of Dr. Who, doesn’t it? I caught this one in downtown SF the other evening. The lighting on the building really caught my eye but only once I was directly underneath it. I captured this shot, which I think is very interesting to look at, and thought I’d share.
I’ve shown you the inside of the Energy Biosciences Building before, but I’m particularly happy with the way this shot captures the grandeur of all of this wood, steel, concrete, and glass. The sun casts the best shadows and refractory patterns through it all. (Well, maybe not THROUGH the concrete–but on it, anyway.)
The University of British Columbia’s campus has the odd quality that many modern campuses do. The vast majority of the buildings are post-war additions, and carry the strong characteristics and visions of each of their respective architects. This particular building caught my eye for the way it integrates a Japanese-style bridge, pool, and island into the courtyard of what could otherwise be a glossy but unremarkable structure.
The combination makes me think of the entrance to some sort of futuristic dojo in a cyberpunk novel. No wonder William Gibson calls Vancouver home.
When I’ve published photographs from UC Berkeley’s student machine shop in the past, I’ve tended to focus on the enormous, ancient, and immovable machine tools that dominate the shop. The tiny details at the edges, however, are the key to making everything function. Here we see the array of a Allen wrenches, tool bits, and cutting oil necessary to turn a chunk of steel into a precise part.
Flying high above Brazil, I got a feel for the strange contrasts of the country. Over the interior, I saw mostly mountainous jungle and farmland; as we neared the coast (as in today’s shot), I got to see more of the urban side of modern Brazil. In the southern part of Brazil, where the climate is Mediterranean (much like California), the same pattern of “intense urbanization adjacent to vegetation-carpeted hills” seems to predominate.
With the sun setting behind me into the Pacific, the light on the Golden Gate Bridge, the city, and the Bay Bridge beyond it (thus the sandwich effect) begins to shift from golden to deep blue. The lights came on just as the rain started to spit, and the whole scene made me wish I’d brought a thermos of hot chocolate with me.
Today’s post is a particularly old photograph of mine–so old, in fact, that you’ll have to pardon the fact that it was taken before I owned a DSLR. I happened upon it the other night, and it was so lovely that I just couldn’t resist processing and posting it.
Above Bridal Veil Falls, in the box canyon cliffs surrounding Telluride, CO, is this building. At first, it looks to be a lonely house, but the truth is far more fascinating: it is the second AC hydroelectric power station in the United States. The facility was restored in the 1980’s, and still provides 1/4 of the power to the little town of Telluride in the distance.
You can’t tell by looking at the photo but the property being worked on is actually accessible by road. But I can see the appeal of getting things delivered by boat when you live on the water at the end of a rather steep ravine.
New England has a lot of forest remaining. That might seem obvious, but in comparison to places like the UK (where millennia of human activity have annihilated most of the forests), it can be a bit startling.
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