HDR Photography
Our July/August home-away-from-home in Kentucky is a farm cottage on a tiny, quiet country road… Well, quiet most nights. On this particular evening, a concert had just let out at the vineyard across the road and a sudden blast of vehicles added some passers-by to our neighborhood.
Uprooted, performing in a private residence. As David Crosby said on “4-Way Street”: “This is wooden music again, so you gotta be cool, otherwise you won’t hear it.” In this setting, acoustic instruments were paired with a wooden structure.
I photographed the small clearings around homes in the hills of Park City, Utah, but that wasn’t the case for every structure. In this case, only the metal roof and chimney are visible above the pines. That’s a cozy contrast to the more populous valley in the background.
Thick forests carpet the hills of Utah, except where they don’t. In many of those little clearings, a human-made structure is visible. The cabin in the foreground clearing looks particularly inviting.
Our time at Kentucky Horse Park events, and by extension at this charming cottage, has come to an end. We’re New York bound!
Photographing landscapes and structures (and being the son of civil engineers), I’ve become a bit of an architecture fanboy. The trend towards building with shipping containers, whether a do-it-yourself effort or a pre-fab corporate approach, seems particularly exciting. This weekend, I encountered this in-construction house built from three forty-foot intermodal containers. The owners added sloped roof, a permanent foundation, and windows and doors outside, but they liked the shipping container aesthetic and plan to keep all of the original paint and labeling outside. I find that look charmingly authentic.
Inside, however, there’s little hint of the structure’s more exotic origins. Though, like the exterior, the interior is still under construction, there’s a straightforward home inside the three long shipping containers worth of space.
We’re on our way out of the North Country, headed for a sabbatical in California, but the little houses (first built for mill workers) of Canton, New York will be there to welcome us back.
I just thought the clouds in the sky looked super appealing last night.
Homes designed to weather the fierce winters of northern New England and the North Country have a particular structure: Something vaguely Scandinavian and reminiscent of a Viking longhouse. When the sun sets and the clouds gather for our (current) proper winter, I’m glad for the equivalence.
Fall in the North Country makes dramatic skies and shadows. What I’ll call “drivewayhenge” aligned the sun precisely with this driveway, allowing for much of the scene to be in shadow while the garage at the end is a glowing beacon. In typical North Country fashion, that garage is a Millenium Falcon of useful modifications.
A quaint home, encrusted in snow and accompanied by a Subaru and a stand of pines, makes for a perfect slice of North Country life. Today’s winter storm brought this image back to my mind.
The North Country is carpeted in snow (not shown). I like to think back to the lazy, shoveling-free fall days when homes were just beginning to mystically gird themselves for the oncoming blizzard. Life merrily passes by these old, modest homes.
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.
I dream of the perfect vacation house, nestled on the shores of some lonely Adirondack lake and stocked with just the right combination of boats and brews and firewood. I project this dream onto this unassuming cabin and its charming beach, nestled on the shore of Mirror Lake.
Berkeley is an eclectic, bizarre place to look at homes. This particular alleyway, with its Middle-Earth-esque Old-World charm, it less than a block from UCB’s campus.
Decaseconds 