HDR Photography
The stunning, overwhelming, almost-heartbreaking Muir Woods National Monument in California has become a photographic cliché. (Thanks, Ansel Adams.) That doesn’t prevent me from discovering something new in every corner and every moment. The incredible contrast of scale between ferns and sequoias twists the mind, and the quiet, misty paths (early in the morning anyway) transport you to an overwhelming alternate world.
I’m down in New Haven, CT for a conference—a great opportunity to shoot a classic American east-coast city, you say? But my camera is doing double duty shooting horses this weekend! What is a photographer without a camera (and with a lovely view of New Haven in the morning from the top of the Omni Hotel) to do? I’m not the biggest evangelist for iPhone photography, but in a pinch (and with the help of a handy bracketing app), it’s possible to account for a lot of the device’s shortcomings and produce photos that can transmit at least a degree of the desired effect. For the ubiquitous “multitool in your pocket,” that’s pretty good.
When I have to be up early to shoot a horse show, I make certain to take advantage of the occasion. In looking across the autumn North Country fields, I was amused by the “chronological asymmetry” between the looming living tree and the stump of “tree-past.”
In the dining hall of Timberline Lodge (just around the corner from the gorgeous main hall), the imposing wood and the elegant place settings seem immovable and eternal. The human beings floating through, blurry and insubstantial and fleeting, are as ghosts.
Rolling over in a strange hotel bed, in an an unfamiliar city, at 5:30 AM: not the time most conducive to photographic adventure. Seeing these dramatic clouds over Mirror Lake, and their drastic shadows, was enough to get me moving. Still, I ran into a problem rare on the west coast: it was so much warmer and more humid outside that I had to work quickly before the lens fogged.
Not far from Muir Woods, the Pacific coast cliffs of California are a starker, steeper, and foggier place than I expected. The nearly sheer cliff face, the scraggly trees hanging on for dear life, and the weather- (and person-) beaten railings make the whole place feel mythical. The fog density hit just the right soupiness on this particular day; we could just barely see and hear the waves crashing on the rocks below.
I only spent two nights in the surreal alpine mountainscape of Oregon’s Timberline Lodge. Though my previous photos were either in the dark of night or far-off scenes, I’m quite enamored of this morning shot. The mountaintop and the slopes stand in the distance, the morning light is casting long shadows, and the shiny carafes of coffee promise a sharp start.
In the same vein as my last post, and captured on the same day even, I present a close-up photo of ice crystals on a hunk of driftwood. Like a miniature forest, I thought it was so peculiar, but so neat looking I had to grab a couple shots.
It’s not everyday you decide to go to the beach and find that it’s covered in frost.
I went down to the beach to try out my new Christmas present on this fine PNW morning. I’ll have to admit that I constructed the mini-cairn myself, but I thought the texture in the rocks and on the rock surface was cool so I decided to post it anyway. I might have to try to pose things and create shots more often.
I’ve already posted a few shots from inside the Westgate Hotel, but very few of the view outside. The civic center area of downtown San Diego has a strange claustrophobia to it that I’ve not felt in cities like Chicago or New York, despite their narrower streets. As the morning light first started to battle past the towers, I was feeling this constriction most poignantly.
Decaseconds 