HDR Photography
A perfect late-summer morning at Mohonk Mountain House holds the promise of a day spent outside. While this image may be a sequel to last week’s post, I think this other angle reveals a far different view of the possibilities a day can hold when experiencing vacation.
“Too many” may be an exaggeration, but a field full of ponies on a Kentucky evening sure feels like it’s pushing the limit.
While the Interstate system feels like an ingrained part of American culture at this point, its presence (in the Eastern U.S., anyway) is revealed as a late addition from a drone’s eye view: the original patterns of farms and country roads has this massive strip of highway laid atop it.
Rain brings spontaneous desert symmetry breaking: some areas become rivers and streams, while others stay high and dry. La Quinta Cove brings hiking trails into this equation. Looking high over the landscape, those trails and dry streambeds may be hard to distinguish—until the rain comes. In the distance, just above the tan tanks on the left of the image, the Salton Sea serves as a reminder of how water and the desert interact.
My trips to this hill last year were constrained by the limitations of gravity; bringing my drone with me this year opened up whole new vistas and geometries. The artificial nature of this water retention area is far more apparent when view from the air.
A lot happens around the Kentucky cottage when we’re home from a show, but I have to admit that a pair of vultures drying out after a sudden thunderstorm in the top of a tree with a rainbow behind them isn’t what I was expecting…
This look from Papaya through the trees was pretty profound but still not really what I was expecting…
Quiet grazing in a sunset-lit paddock is perhaps closer to expectations, but this idyllic, Miyazaki-esque view still surprised me with the sense of warm summer calm.
Like a child’s legos, spilled out onto the floor until they reach the wall of the room, the sprawl of Coachella Valley reaches from one mountain range to the other.
Of course, when that sprawl does reach the edge, modern California’s land conservation kicks in and a hard barrier appears between homes and desert.
Today marks the start of the spring semester at many colleges and universities. A wistful look back at winter break and its associated festivities seemed appropriate.
I found myself returning to one of my earliest Decaseconds posts (almost exactly 11 years ago) as I updated my Top 32 album on Flickr—the digital portfolio where I display my best (or simply favorite) photographs. Finding “Waves and Rocks Dwarf Man” in that set, I saw both the excellent light and composition that my old Nikon had captured in 2011, as well as all of the places where my choices in processing the original image now left my unsatisfied. Rather than simply reprocessing that original image, I went back to the folder of camera raws from that day and selected an image I took just moments later to tackle. (Always keep save those raw files!) I not only like this composition better than the older one, but I also feel that I have brought something new out here, rather than simply reprocessing something old.
Making it up to a good view in time to catch some sunset colors is great in any area, of course, but the open nature of desert landscapes means that at least I won’t miss the colors if I don’t make it all the way there.
The New York Times, ever the Gen Z style-watchers, have decreed 2000s-era point-and-shoot cameras and their attendant nostalgia to be the next big thing. I was inspired to go back to my own point-and-shoot-shot originals from the era, and uncovered some surprisingly good shots that I’d somehow never before considered. Just look at the tower-like cloud in this sunrise from a 2005 trip to Key West; how did I miss this shot?
This grand desert setting has a tiny bonus: can you spot the tiny walker in the foreground?
Just before a snowstorm battered the northeast, we’ve escaped back to the desert. The rocks are craggy, the nights are weirdly cold, and there’s always a palm tree swaying in the distance.
Can you spot the tiny figures at the top of the hill? I’m confident that tiny figures produce a sense of grand scale in images—particular desert shots, like this one, where the inhuman nature of the place can make understanding the sizes of objects difficult. Nonetheless, I find myself wondering how small the figures in an image can be before the viewer loses the ability to recognize them as human.
Decaseconds 