HDR Photography
Like a full-time Burning Man, Bombay Beach shifted from its origins as a sort of “California Riviera” in the 1950s to something with more the feel of an artists’ colony. The town’s little grid of streets amid the emptiness of the desert valley brings to mind open-world video game maps, but the eclectic nature of the beach itself makes reality (as usual) far more interesting.
Some kind of teleportation accident seems as likely an explanation as any other for how a swing set wound up in the middle of a lake.
The human-made swing set structure is alone against the huge scale of the Salton Sea, mountains, and sunset beyond. (Excepting, of course, that the Salton Sea is itself effectively human-made.)
One of my best images (and I do mean best) captures a swing set adrift in the Salton Sea, seemingly separated from time and space. While my first worry was that an aerial view of the swing and its setting might remove some of the magic, I’ve realized that the opposite is true. The merging of sea and sky into a single cloud-graced expanse make even the mundane array of vehicles on the shore look parked at the edge of forever.
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.
This shadow-of-a-hypercube sculpture is pretty enormous, but the sense of space and structure changes when view from a drone floating above.
Does anything better match the dome of a capitol than fireworks in the sky and celebratory crowds in a park beneath?
Does any combination more satirically capture the American experience than an SUV and an Airstream trailer traversing the empty wasteland resulting from an ecological disaster?
Peak foliage on Trinity College’s campus looks as effulgent as always, but there’s an added perk in being able to see my downtown-Hartford home in the same shot. (It helps that the building is 27 stories tall, I’ll admit…)
I’ve shown a lot of images of Travelers Tower (one of my favorite pieces of architecture in Hartford), but in my tradition of showing the viewer and the view, this picture also captures the vantage point in Bushnell Tower where those images were taken.
Drone photography geometry exercise: a tetrahedron in profile collapses into a triangle, then reflection doubles it into a diamond.
Fireworks displays in metro areas always mean serious traffic, but the line of stopped cars along Bushnell Park has clearly formed before the fireworks display even ended. From this vantage point, there’s luckily more to see than traffic; the magenta luminescence of excited lithium ions paints its colors across the buildings and treetops of downtown Hartford.
AI-generated images have perhaps made us so inured to impossible images as to dilute the shocking impact of the truly surreal. Bombay Beach’s sculptures, planted in the shores of the Salton Sea, “floating” in the sky, truly look like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
Winter days in the desert are short enough already, but the tall San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains cut the light off even sooner. High up with a drone, there are still some final rays to be harvested.
The first weeks of school during my senior year at Trinity College, all the way back in 2007, were memorable to me for a lot of reasons; one of those was because it was just unbearably hot for a couple of weeks. Now, having returned to campus as a faculty member, I’ve apparently brought this weather back with me. The mostly-un-air-conditioned Clement Chemistry Building is once again my home—but this time, my office has a window unit.
Decaseconds 