November rush-hour traffic in Dublin provides a glowing array down the street, but I have to imagine it’s more frustrating to be sitting in said traffic.
Tag: Long exposure
Bushnell Tower at Night
I.M. Pei really outdid himself with the design of Hartford’s Bushnell Tower. While the building is carefully monochrome during the day, I love the various colors exploding from the windows at night.
A Return Trip to Brazil
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.
Two Views from Hartford in the Summer
As summer has officially concluded, I wanted to look back on some images from my first one in Hartford.
Fireworks set off early on the Fourth of July quickly shrouded the area in smoke.
As the moon moves around the horizon, it aligns with different features in the skyline.
Light-Up Gazebos
Mohonk’s gazebos are iconic, but in my childhood, they vanished into the woods as night fell. The addition of strings of lights to them means that they stand out more without the sunlight.
Hartford Gotham
The mixture of mid-twentieth-century architecture, spotlights, lightning, soft focus, and color grading all sum to transform Hartford into Tim Burton’s 1989 vision of Gotham.
Mohonk Nightwall
Warm, welcoming, and… monolithic? Though Mohonk is a huge, castle-esque structure, the hotel nonetheless feels deeply cozy in the evening. Perhaps it’s the sense of life about it. Zoom all the way in and people are visible, enjoying the warm air on the many balconies.
Island Gazebo Facing the Hotel
All of the little details of place—the railings and paths, the docks and balconies—stand out in the blue hour. There’s a cozy contrast between the warm lights of Mohonk Mountain House and the cooler colors of the little gazebo atop at rock staring back at the hotel.
Tree Outlier
A cliff face may not seem the optimal spot for a tree, but there will always be specimens that go against the grain. (I couldn’t help myself.) The lights of the granary barbecue across the lake almost makes me think that this particular tree is pining (again, I’m sorry) to pick up its roots and go join the party.
Best Wishes for a Fast Recovery, Coachella Valley
“Coachella Valley was just battered by Hurricane Hilary.” — What an odd sentence to write. Today, we’re looking back to times when the idea of this dry lake bed being hit by a hurricane sounded like science fiction.
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Colton’s Dam
Every town between the high peaks of the Adirondacks and the low point of the St. Lawrence River seems to have its own modest hydroelectric dam to capture their slice of the accrued aqueous kinetic energy.
Rapid Patterns
Though there’s chaos in the turbulent flows of rapids through Stone Valley, I like the rhythm in the repeated lengthscale between crests. The long exposure smooths out the water, but the trees remain sharp and spiky.
Bushnell Tower Watching Fireworks
Flying a drone in downtown Hartford requires some extra permissions, but they’re worth chasing for the opportunity to capture shots like this one: Bushnell Tower, the State Capitol, and a rain-checked fireworks display arrayed above Bushnell Park.
How Did I Miss These?
A post came on social media from more than 11 years ago reminded me of trips around the Bay Area; comparing my RAW files with the images I ultimately posted to Decaseconds originally left me asking, “How did I miss these?”
In past cases of reprocessing pictures, I took another approach to images I already knew were solid. This first image today, boat sailing near Point Bonita lighthouse north of San Francisco, is in a whole different category: I hadn’t remember that I’d taken the image at all.
The occasion was a trip to the Legion of Honor and Lincoln Park. Back then, not a single picture made it to Decaseconds. Many of the images from that day suffered from issues that I know how to correct now, but didn’t yet have the tools to conquer in early 2012.
These pictures from a trip to Treasure Island to shoot the San Francisco skyline are likewise mystifying. I posted only a single picture from that trip.
The old and new spans of the Bay Bridge, side-by-side, is a literally now-unseeable image.
Though a lot of posts came of our trip to the Marin Headlands to shoot the Golden Gate Bridge, this more natural shot of the rocky coastline (those little black dots are sea birds) has its own kind of large-scale glory.
Of course, a trip back through my photography in the Bay Area wouldn’t be complete without a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge that I previously ignored.
Bicentennial Fireworks
This weekend, my wife and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary alongside Trinity College‘s bicentennial. Given that we met at college, the symmetry felt impactful. Though the fireworks might not have been intended to be exclusively for us, they felt just a little extra special.
Decaseconds 