HDR Photography
I guess I’m still discovering new tricks up the DJI Mini 3 Pro’s sleeve. I’ve never managed to create a panorama (much less one looking up) from drone images before, but this massive shot of the sunset over the San Jacinto Mountains has changed all of that. The pink clouds arc above and the Empire Polo Club (home of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival) spreads across the foreground.
(You’ll definitely want to click through for full resolution on this one.)
Park Street might have been named for a different park (the one up the street), but the glow of St. Lawrence’s campus at night (the reverse view of this shot) has a delightful Central Park vibe that matches the street name well.
One of St. Lawrence’s monikers is “A Candle in the Wilderness,” and this drone shot of the bright campus with the dark forests beyond explains the name.
Over the course of the past few years, Canton’s park fountain has been graciously renovated and restored. The aerial view of the fountain at the lower edge of today’s image is nicely highlighted by the light streaks of passing vehicles.
Atop forested cliffs, the view to the porch and dock of Mohonk Mountain House has a “child’s treehouse” quality that matches well with the magical feeling of the place.
Route 11, the main road connecting the whole North Country (we don’t have any Interstates), runs through a series of quaint downtowns, where it temporarily becomes Main St. The impressive stability of the DJI Mini 3 Pro meant that I could capture long, smooth light trails from headlights and taillights representing the evening’s traffic.
I’ll be teaching my first class of the Fall 2022 semester tomorrow morning, so today seemed like the perfect day to reflect on the campus to which I’m returning. The structures amidst the trees sure look good from 100 meters up.
This image also brings up an interesting note on aspect ratios: Since the start of Decaseconds, I’ve largely been formatting my very favorite images in a 1.6:1 (i.e., 16:10) aspect ratio, such that they’d function well as desktops for my various MacBook Pro laptops. The advent of the “notch” and associated added screen real estate means that new MBPs have a 1.547:1 ratio—and thus my favorite images (like this one) are arriving with a new aspect ratio.
The opposite side of Equus Run (in both space and time) from Friday’s post finds a concert letting out and light trails along the normally empty Moores Mill Road.
Our July/August home-away-from-home in Kentucky is a farm cottage on a tiny, quiet country road… Well, quiet most nights. On this particular evening, a concert had just let out at the vineyard across the road and a sudden blast of vehicles added some passers-by to our neighborhood.
A full-scale fireworks display is usually “far away”—over a park or a body of water, perhaps. When St. Lawrence University puts on a fireworks show for graduation, however, the fireworks are right on campus. Imagine watching that show from your dorm-room window!
Fireworks are lovely displays of chemistry and physics in action on their own, of course, but there’s an extra dimension of enjoyment from being part of a crowd and feeling the shared excitement.
This view of Coit Tower and the western span of the Bay Bridge brought to you by the oddness of San Francisco zoning and real estate that prevent view-blocking high-rise construction. (Whether that’s a good thing is another question…)
Add a mile or so above the Mile High City and the sunset views are spectacular, even on clear winter nights.
Seeking to print some images for a tall, narrow section of wall near a window in my office, I realized that I don’t shoot vertically very often. Perhaps that comes from what originally drove my interest in photography—making cooler desktop wallpapers for my computer. I traveled back to 2013 to find a vertical shot that really tickled my fancy (though luckily Adobe’s Super Resolution was up to the task of upsizing for printing.) The warm sodium-vapor-and-neon glow of San Francisco’s Embarcadero (stacked with the Transamerica Pyramid and Coit Tower) are a moment frozen in time, if not least because the switch to LED streetlights is totally changing the hue of an American city at night.
Decaseconds 