HDR Photography
The Green Lighthouse is “El Far Verd” in Spanish—”It does what it says on the tin.” Speaking of “tin,” the general aesthetic of the lighthouse really shouts for a certain twentieth-century adventure from the likes of Tintin.
Heading back to the mainland after a Thanksgiving on Martha’s Vineyard, I captured this panorama from the upper deck of the Steamship Authority ferry. The width of our decaseconds homepage doesn’t do it justice; I recommend clicking through and zooming in to see all of the details on Flickr.
This lonely cottage by the dunes and brush of a late-autumn Atlantic beach reminds me of a half-remembered setting from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold near the start of the novel, on the Dutch coast. There’s a lonely quiet to the image but the road and house suggest some respite on the horizon.
Down at the end of the long and windswept path to Lighthouse Beach and the Edgartown Harbor Lighthouse, can you spot the little figure of the walker between the bushes?
Tiny details of docks and homes and lighthouses against the grand scope of a late-autumn Martha’s Vineyard coastline make this a image for which I would really encourage you to click through to the full-sized version on Flickr.
Atlantic weather ages every part of Martha’s Vineyard, but the combination of textures and colors of age (rusted iron, grayed cedar, turned leaves) really captures a broad spectrum of possibility. The somewhat “impossible” geometry of the image places them in juxtaposition.
The beach pictures from La Jolla Shores inspired me to revisit some of my other past beach shots—but these are from a bit farther away: Florianopolis, Brazil.
Applying the same low-contrast processing really revealed a lot more of the details on the clifftop figures. I’m amazed when I compare these shots with similar ones I processed years ago. It’s amazing what a decade of practice can do!
I found myself returning to one of my earliest Decaseconds posts (almost exactly 11 years ago) as I updated my Top 32 album on Flickr—the digital portfolio where I display my best (or simply favorite) photographs. Finding “Waves and Rocks Dwarf Man” in that set, I saw both the excellent light and composition that my old Nikon had captured in 2011, as well as all of the places where my choices in processing the original image now left my unsatisfied. Rather than simply reprocessing that original image, I went back to the folder of camera raws from that day and selected an image I took just moments later to tackle. (Always keep save those raw files!) I not only like this composition better than the older one, but I also feel that I have brought something new out here, rather than simply reprocessing something old.
Standing on the cliffs of Florianopolis, Brazil in spring is just the time to record a “picture postcard” image.
May has brought summery weather to the North Country and reminds me of summers past. The rock-strewn beaches of Humarock, outside Boston, provided the backdrop to boyhood Junes and Julys.
My favorite cities are those with borders artificially constrained by water (like San Francisco, Hong Kong, or Manhattan), usually leading to towering structures and high density. San Francisco’s situation was different for a long time; a subset of NIMBY residents (alongside an array of other economic factors) meant that this grid of smaller buildings persists, in spite of housing shortages and corresponding high housing prices. As this slowly changes and the city begins to warm to the idea of new development, this uniform grid of little buildings might someday shift.
The Bay Area features a surprisingly large number of preserved open spaces. The lone figure on the hillside, looking from the relative emptiness of the Marin Headlands across to the grid of San Francisco residences, emphasizes the point well.
The Pacific Ocean meets the San Francisco Bay through the Golden Gate. With so much happening in a concentrated location, the density of interesting stuff frankly demands a panorama to capture it all. I particularly like the tiny shape of Alcatraz, floating off to the left with its windows reflecting the setting sun.
Spending an afternoon on the pier in Pacifica, CA is as good a time as any. Crab fishing has its varied sets of tools and techniques, but the experience to me has been about more than that. Cooking on a portable hibachi and getting crusty with salt spray is the real core of the process.
Decaseconds 