HDR Photography
So much of New England looks like a post card, but I have to admit that this town green in Weston, MA is particularly charming. The whole concept seems idyllic: this enormous expanse of flawless grass, with an ancient stone wall on one side and a stand of trees on the other. The young family picnicking in the middle makes it perfect.
Berkeley is a strange and wonderful place full of odd things in the least expected places. For instance check out this mural by Beth Emmerich, far up in the Berkeley Hills away from prying eyes. It’s actually kind of an experience, and it wraps around on all three sides of this car port. She’s also got photos (not taken by me) of other samples of her murals and other art on her website, if you’re interested.
I’ve always abhorred airports. Actual air travel, if dull, is typically calm and uneventful. Airports are Purgatory-on-Earth where stressed travelers worry and fuss and cope with the imminent delay and cancellation of their flights.
Still, if I have to spend time in an airport, Chicago’s Midway is probably my favorite. It has by far and away the best selection of overpriced food (Potbelly’s sandwiches! Pegasus gyros!) and an at least tolerable amount of seating. In its own way, Midway is not entirely un-beautiful.
Berkeley is host to all manner of landscaping choices, and on this particular day I found a block or so which was completely dominated by an eastern aesthetic. I found the contrast of the jade with the untreated wood, as well as the lack of parallel lines, especially interesting. The effect was completed by the backdrop of Japanese maples and bamboo.
A magnification of the jade detail in the center.
UCB’s Tolman Hall has a surprising number of urban legends surrounding its uniquely 1960’s appearance. The building is overcrowded and soon to be renovated, but I have to admit that it has a certain charm when the evening light bounces through concrete surfaces of its breezeway. The blues and greens of the shadowed campus and the golden sunset colors are appealing, to be sure, but it’s really the textures that I find so fascinating. The combination of precast and cast-in-place concrete means that there are at least four different textures here, each one reflecting and scattering light in its own, unique way.
On a recent stroll through the hills east of Berkeley I came upon this house I had seen many times before but never really seen, you know? At first glance it looks like a perfectly reasonable home there’s something about the degree to which the landscaping in the foreground engulfs the home and the juxtaposition of this with the palm tree in the background that I really find fascinating. It looks like the kind of house that would be the setting for some sort of fantasy novel where a normal kid ends up going on some sort of magical adventure.
My lab is packed with control boxes and oscilloscopes and all manner of signal processing equipment; strung between them all, like the web of a spider on caffeine, is a truly epic array of cables and wires connecting and powering the whole rig. On an average day, when nothing is (seriously) broken, I tend to forget about the mess of electronics, but it’s worth the attention (every now and then) to stop and really appreciate the ordered chaos that facilitates ultrafast spectroscopy.
And now a quick holiday bonus. I wanted to get this one out while it was fresh in my mind: the glorious experience of watching half a dozen Fourth of July fireworks shows simultaneously. It’s moments like this, gazing over the bay and its gorgeous lights, that I really appreciate living here.
The Bay Area has a set of dichotomies that I’ve always loved fitting into photographs. Here, we have the elegance of San Francisco herself, with towers and an array of sailing boats, contrasted with the decay of the East Bay and its own host of boats.
While not the most attractive rose garden in the world, there is something attractive about Berkeley Rose Garden’s terraces, which office a nice backdrop for the attached tennis courts and are good for a nice relaxing afternoon on a sunny day if you want to get out of downtown, but not necessarily out of Berkeley. Being situated up in the hills it is surprisingly quiet and I was able to get surprisingly unobstructed views of the rows of plants.
A recent trip to Golden Gate Fields’ delicious/seductive/nauseating dollar days (dollar beers and dollar hot dogs for everyone!) gave me a chance to shoot not only the races themselves (more of that to come later), but also to shoot the mostly-empty rows of seats. They’s all plastic, and over time they slowly lose color and bleach from bright orange to dull, powdery brown. Thus follows the lifecycle of a chair. Gazing out over the ordered sea, their slow march to replacement is obvious.
The fire trails up in the Berkeley hills are notable for the views they reveal at the top, the payout for climbing the hills on foot, but on the way to top you can find some fairly interesting nature-filled set pieces like this shady water way.
There are many times when HDR helps us to capture images that appear more similar to what the human eye naturally perceives than a camera would normally be capable. In other cases, however, HDR reveals features that we might never have perceived. In this case, the complete intricacies of a gas-discharge lamp acting as a sign are revealed. (As a neurotic chemist, I can’t properly call it a neon light–those only glow orange!)
One of my earliest posts displayed the surreal beauty of Christmastime in the frigid suburbs of Chicago; given that much of the country is experiencing the balmy joy of summer, I thought a wee reminder of chillier times might be appropriate. (This photograph also continues what has apparently become a series, “Trees Next to Buildings.”)
Today’s image is the result of a little experiment I did, in which I limited myself to shooting only with a simple prime lens. This is perhaps my favorite image that stemmed from the experience: Berkeley’s historic Lewis Hall on a rainy afternoon. The reflections from the wet concrete buildings, the grid of the plaza’s brick pattern, and the intricate array of the hall’s windows combine to produce such a strong sense of place. In contrast with these hard, angular, man-made structures are the curves of the redwood trees. Would the picture have been better, had I taken it with a wide-angle zoom lens? I’m really not sure.
Decaseconds 
