HDR Photography
Along Interstate 80, stretches of winter Wyoming are wide and barren like I wouldn’t have believed.
In a few stretches, mountains or wind farms crop up in the distance.
But it’s perhaps this image of an orange house, like something from a mid-twentieth-century landscape painting, that best captures the experience.
During last winter’s road trip from New York to California, we were struck by the sheer scale of the American West: one step off the Interstate drops you into an enormous expanse. At the edge of Wyoming’s Black Hills, there’s a Bob-Ross-ian grandeur to enjoy.
The American West appears in the hills beyond Malibu, California: Small communities connected by winding roads in the shadow of Castro Crest. Visiting Balmoral Farm nearby, I compared (in my mind) with Scotland’s Balmoral Castle and was struck by the degree to which America (mostly) has titanic landscapes in place of castles. What is the attraction to tall formations of stone, and does that change when they’re human-made?
(Side note: I like that this looks like a picture from the past, but I love even more than the effect is ruined by a house with solar panels on its roof. Can you find it? Click through to the Flickr page for the 57 MP original panorama.)
A dusty lens can be a cause for concern, but the flares of sunlight scattering from those particles can make for some rainbow-y lens flare. Paired that with the fallen trees and friendly ferns of Muir Woods National Monument. Instant fairyland!
I imagine the Bay Area like an elementary-school art project bowl, a bit lump and uneven but mostly ringed with hills. And like a proud child filling their handmade bowl with mounds of cereal and milk, there are lumps and liquid in the middle. If I strain the simile to the limit, both the bowl and the Bay are home of delicious foodstuffs. Rushing to the crest of Berkeley’s Grizzly Peak after a rich dinner, I can see the whole bowl. (And avoid the skunk sneaking up on us in the tall grass.)
I’m certainly glad I didn’t fall in while trying to capture this.
While I’m sure it was helped out by recent rainfall, it was worth braving the cold weather and avoiding the falling icicles (you can see some next to the falls if you look closely) to catch the falls in full form. I’ll definitely come back when it’s a bit easier to get down closer to the actual falls.
If you squint you can almost see the sign warning against lingering too long near the base of this cell tower.
Literally on a lake near the top of a mountain, Mohonk Mountain House gave my childhood self the illusion of a flying castle. This particular image is an iconic one for me, but it’s also part of a family of “ubiquitous images” that come from photographing a landmark from one of the only available views: shots like the Yosemite tunnel view, or the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, or the view of Manhattan over the Brooklyn Heights pilings. Any new image is just adding to the canon.
Summer canoeing is months in the past at Mohonk Mountain House; snow and rime crust the boat dock. On the cliffs in the distance, the hotel’s signature gazebos are (mostly) unoccupied and winter is settling in.
Decaseconds 