HDR Photography
This image of Berkeley and San Francisco on Christmas Day 2016 is one of those shots so lovely that I’m not sure why I haven’t shared it already. All of the little details laid out in the hillsides and city streets of the Bay Area… How did I miss this one?
In the era before the Bay Bridge and BART tunnel, the ferry between the East Bay and San Francisco departed from the end of a long pier. (The pier used to be even longer—the Berkeley Marina extended into the water around it.) The ferry ended service in 1937, after the bridge opened, but remained a popular location for fishing until it deteriorated to its current unsafe state. I’m kind of fascinated to see its skeleton jutting out into the Bay, a linear form amid rolling marine layer clouds.
Citizens of the North Country spent much of their spring quarantines in the woods; the campfire smoke from just beyond Lampson Falls attests to the family spending the night below.
My hope for the New Year is more opportunities to travel to places like Prague and capture views like these.
The apparently slow and placid water above Lampson Falls seems out of character with the dramatic torrent downstream.
After days of rain, show finally settled over the North Country on Christmas afternoon. With little bits of grass poking above the snowy hillsides, I’m reminded of a sort of low-rent English countryside equivalent.
Just before the solstice, I most appreciate processing my pictures from spring. The needles and fallen leaves of winter are still on the ground in this image from Lampson Falls, but new life is pushing through.
(Can you spot me on the left side of the picture, at the top of the falls?)
Living in the North Country means a very northern feature to the seasons: wild swings in the amount of daylight. Even a month before the solstice, the sun has nearly vanished by 4:00 PM.
Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being takes place in these environs of Prague, and something of the dramatic clouds and deep black of this image reminded me of that novel.
In the weirder hills of the Bay Area, back yard detritus falls alongside stones pulled into position by ancient glaciers.
Dawn in Napa brings the kinds of landscapes, with layer upon layer of hills and fields and trees, that I associate with prints of impressionist oil paintings scattered around the average home in the late twentieth century.
In a too-on-the-nose metaphor, here the Oswegatchie River joints the St. Lawrence River, with Canada looking on; this week, a new class (2024!) of Laurentians arrived to St. Lawrence University’s campus.
A wet, mild California winter (rather the opposite of what the Bay Area is unfortunately currently experiencing) may make for a lovely view in wine country, but I’m not sure I’d want to stop at that particular seat… It looks like it has captured more than its share of the dampness of its environs.
Rolling Adirondack foothills make for a whole array of waterfalls around the North Country. Lampson Falls looks particularly good from this “impossible” (sans drone) profile perspective, with sunset light reflecting off the pool in the foreground.
The little islands in Canton’s stretch of the Grasse River make me think of Huckleberry Finn’s stops along the Mississippi but, you know, scaled down.
