HDR Photography
The Netherlands’ relationship with water and land is such a long and complicated one. This site, Ommermars Natuurspeeltuin (which I believe translates to “nature playground”—Dutch speakers, get in the comments!), feels like it might be prepared to cast some sort of deep, ancient magic to influence that relationship.
New adventures in color grading have brought me back, much as I did with images from Spring 2012, to my Fall 2012 trip to Florianopolis, Brazil. Big changes in how I tackle challenging raw images have produced a drastically different outcome to my photoprocessing.
The dark rocks and chaotic waves come through in a whole different way.
So, too, does this sculpture stretched over the water—the purpose of which, if there is one, I’ve still not ascertained.
There’s a sense of texture and place that a dark ocean and bright beach convey together.
I can still remember wandering back to my room at the end of the evening, feeling like I was a visitor to an alien world.
The beach pictures from La Jolla Shores inspired me to revisit some of my other past beach shots—but these are from a bit farther away: Florianopolis, Brazil.
Applying the same low-contrast processing really revealed a lot more of the details on the clifftop figures. I’m amazed when I compare these shots with similar ones I processed years ago. It’s amazing what a decade of practice can do!
A dawn flight from Palm Springs to Los Angeles (long story) passed over land that looked like potting soil—so muddy and fertile.
The view from the aircraft window while departing Dublin Aiport was quintessentially Irish on this particular morning.
A likely astonishing number of my childhood’s imaginary forts and escapes were on islands. Though I have no idea why, the present-day result is that my head snaps to the side with every Adirondack island I pass. What adventure could be happening there?
Amongst the Thousand Islands, scattered between New York and Ontario, this island of fields and wind turbines seems to be astride the past and the future.
As a child, I was deeply interested in the idea of islands—these isolated, well-defined chunks of land that were separated from everyone else. My favorite LEGO sets were those modeling pirates marooned on desert islands. I wonder what my childhood self would have thought of living in a town with an uninhabited island at its center?
From a less literal island in my last post to much more literal set on the other side of the country: this scattering of islands in the center of Canton, New York are equally their own little tree-clusters.
A trail, complete with cool stairs and abandoned ruins, on an island in the middle of town is something my childhood self would have been absolutely over the moon with. From a drone’s eye view, I think that sense of magic is effectively captured.
Seen here from the One World Observatory on a sunny Sunday morning, Governors Island has been mostly transformed to park space. On the right side of the island, you can see the Longines Global Champions Tour grounds are still in place from the day before.
The dividing of the southern end of the Hudson River into New York and New Jersey is subject to a great deal of mythology, but whatever the truth is, the practical reality today makes the difference between the two feel pretty fuzzy.
Late spring brings some of the best sunset clouds to Saranac Lake, but the evening temperatures would never let you confuse it for summer.
Visiting Governors Island (lacking that apostrophe since 1784) for the first time this weekend, I was astonished to see its historic buildings standing in such contrast to the sleekly modern shape of One World Trade Center in the distance. The island is only 800 yards off the coast of Manhattan, but seems a generation away.
As busy as the cities of the Bay Area become, there are the spaces in the fire trails (like the one in the foreground) to get some quiet and distance. There’s an odd orthogonality of the senses in being able to see all of the commotion below with none of the accompanying sound.
Decaseconds 