HDR Photography
After an enormous Thanksgiving dinner, we stood out in the cold, under the stars, and gazed into infinity at the disk of the Milky Way. The world feels small and calm on a noiseless fall night. I don’t know that I’d ever recognized the galaxy before.
Looking south, over the rooftops and streetlights of downtown Berkeley, the high-rise buildings of Oakland and Emeryville are luminescent ghosts in the bay fog. I’ve come back to this photograph again and again—the composition isn’t quite right, the quality is just average, but for some reason I find it inescapable. I can forgive all of its sins (and mine in taking it) for the trajectory of those sodium lamps, arcing gently to the south like some fairy worm.
St. Lawrence University celebrated Parents’ Weekend on Saturday with a gorgeous fireworks display on the south side of campus. Conveniently, this is the sky above Johnson Hall of Science. The combination of architectural textures, floral fireworks patterns, and fall foliage make for an image that would be more at home in a video game than reality.
At the end of a long day on Oregon’s Mt. Hood, returning in the evening to Timberline Lodge and its gorgeous/unique internal geometry is at once (slightly) alienating and welcoming. This quiet reading corner meets all of my criteria: not far from a fireplace and with the perfect chairs for curling up with hot chocolate. The blue fabric of these chairs, and their combination of rustic wood and steel, put me in mind of the This End Up furniture of the 1980s. The childhood associations only make the place more mentally comfortable.
St. Lawrence University’s Johnson Hall of Science is a lovely, brand-new science building (particularly appreciated by chemists who prefer not to work in the miasma of their predecessors’ experiments.) The aesthetic benefits are supplemented by olfactory ones: in addition to excellent ventilation inside, the exterior of the building is surrounded by wild grasses and flowers that energize me the moment I step outside.
When viewed at night, the luminous quality of the glass facade lends the place a storybook look that I think HDR captures perfectly.
In the sylvan core of UBC’s (aptly named) Green College, a few random buildings hide with the trees. Some have pedestrian uses (literally—the building on the right is a stairwell), but others are more surreal: this little cottage is a shared-use kitchen. As the first rays of moonlight catch the scene, I can’t help but be reminded of some Tolkienesque elven fortress.
What is “honesty” in photography? My goal as a photographer is to capture what I saw—the subjective experience of being in a single moment. I want to capture a “truth.” The process of taking a picture is projecting the reality around us onto a sensor and through myriad digital processes to create the photograph you see in front of you now. Every photographer has, in their pursuit of truth in imaging, some lines in terms of image manipulation that they will and won’t cross. HDR, for instance, is viewed as a “cheat” by some, and as a better approach to getting the true dynamic range of the human eye by others.
A less dramatic case, however, is the use of color in an image. Last night, the sky over Canton was this incredible, surreal, and otherworldly pink-orange color that was completely overwhelming and astonishing. When I noticed it out the window, I sprinted outside with my camera and captured the final, fleeting moments. I was in that moment. Nearly the same effect, however, could have been achieved with a simply pink photo filter. To me, this raises two issues:
Granted, I don’t speak Portuguese—but if I studied the signs correctly, I believe this building is a recreation of the sort of shack used in converting sugar cane into raw sugar. From the outside, it has just the right Brazilian charm. From the inside, the dichotomy at the heart of modern Brazil is even better represented: traditional cane processing equipment, including massive grinding stones, spend time alongside comfortable couches and a television.
During the blazing August heat, looking back to winter pictures leads to the oddest “time machine effect.” As you can see from the rapidly filling tire tracks in the driveway, we barely made it home ahead of what turned out to be a fierce storm. The comfort of “I don’t have to go out there” is so amplified when standing on a perfect porch, next to the door to a cozy house, and seeing the frozen, dark contrast in the graveyard across the way.
The eternally-damp shoreline of the San Francisco Bay is the fascinating meeting of quaint docks and maritime randomness with the aggressive mass of a full-scale city. Charming piers abut the grandiosity of the Financial District, and the result is a surreal and unique setting. Amid this hubbub, the Coit Tower and the Embarcadero stand out as red beacons.
The night is normally an amber-bathed fry-cooker for my mind. On this particular night last fall, however, high temperatures and a local power outage changed the hues of the world to the red-and-blue-and-white of emergency lights.
On the rocks of Grizzly Peak, nothing resets your soul like seeing the hills and trees towering above the hazy sprawl of Oakland.
Looking down over an intersection in the dead of night reminds me of staring at a moment without time. No cars, no one rushing in and out of the coffee shop. Everything is still. The perfect subject, then, for a photograph.
The enchanting lights and old quasi-industrial look of SOMA under the Bay Bridge capture the feel of San Francisco to me: the relationship with the bay, the sense of history-but-not-quite, and the constant crush of traffic just beneath it.
It’s no Golden Gate Bridge, but the bay bridge lit up at night is a pretty spectacular sight with the water lit up beneath it.
Decaseconds 