HDR Photography
This was one of those moments of pure chance. I was just coming back from a long weekend and hit rain just outside of the Tri-Cities while on some winding mountain roads. Then all of a sudden the rain let up just as I was passing Watauga Lake just in time to see this incredible mist coming off the lake. Within 10 minutes of taking this shot the mist had completely dissipated.
La Jolla Shores is a righteous beach: good swimming, okay surfing (I’m told), and excellent Southern California sights. As mid-twentieth-century architecture has grown on me, I’ve even come to appreciate the homes and UC buildings overlooking the beach—but what must it have been like to visit here 100 years ago?
I wouldn’t say the water was all that inviting (could have been the day) but I thought it was hilarious that the hiking guide I learned about this trek through suggested that if you were in the mood you could go for a “highland dunking.”
This Adirondack-y bridge connects SUNY Canton’s campus to town across a branch of the Grasse River. The photograph is a metaphor for the college experience: being a little apart from the regular world, in a place that’s just a bit magical. On one side of the bridge are normal houses, normal roads, normal life; across the bridge is a gently lit path through the woods. Very Rivendell-esque?
I remembered my tripod but forgot the quick release plate so I had to hand hold my shots. Still, pretty impressed without this shot of the falls turned out. Laurel Run park near Kingsport, TN is a real gem with some good, accessible hiking trails featuring some pretty scenery. Would hike again!
Summer hit the North Country like a truck, ricocheting us from frosty mornings to hyperdense afternoons in the space of a single week. Out in nature, the volatile organic compounds are thick on the breeze. Even the sky is bluer. Above Lampson Falls, everything is placid.
Camping on the beach beneath the falls is grand—though less so when a thunderstorm is right around the corner. The beach shows evidence of the water readily rising.
Another shot of the Channels. I’ll definitely be going back to that spot.
Spring time is one of my favorite times for a hike. The leaves are green but its not too buggy, not too hot, and not too hazy.
Gaze over an enormous, Western, natural landscape, full of Bob-Ross-esque mountains, full of happy little trees. (Well, mostly happy. Probably not the ones in the areas that have been clear-cut.) HDR techniques make images detailed and unreal and unnatural; wet-plate effects (courtesy Analog Effex Pro 2) make images soft and faded. Using the two together, as in this photo of Mt. Jefferson taken from Mt. Hood, makes for something more supernatural than unnatural.
Students bring energy and excitement to my world, so there’s no more exciting time of the year than the start of fall. Though the school year has just ended and summer is beginning, I’m already looking forward to the next season. I live in some bizarro-world version of what I remember experiencing as a boy, when I awaited the start of summer and dreaded the return of the school year.
Hiking the trails at Laurel Run park takes you past a couple of old “homesites” up in the woods behind the park. There’s no arguing the location is pretty, and there’s a nice stream nearby. But the placement of the homes, their remoteness, begs the question how did these people get in and out, or was this area less densely forested once upon a time?
Watauga lake is a pretty spectacular man made lake which, judging by the view down the other side of Watauga Dam (the top of which makes up part of the Appalachia Trail) used to be a pretty spectacular river valley.
Puget Sound is great, but the beaches are not exactly filled with nice clean sand.
You don’t have to pass through these rocks on the Appalachian trail in the Grayson Highlands, but its a lot more fun if you do.
Compared with some crossings in the area this bridge feels a little over-engineered. Not that I’m complaining about the fact that it has handrails on both sides.
Decaseconds 