HDR Photography
Like a child’s legos, spilled out onto the floor until they reach the wall of the room, the sprawl of Coachella Valley reaches from one mountain range to the other.
Of course, when that sprawl does reach the edge, modern California’s land conservation kicks in and a hard barrier appears between homes and desert.
Today marks the start of the spring semester at many colleges and universities. A wistful look back at winter break and its associated festivities seemed appropriate.
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.)
Coachella Valley is a desert that was once home to a lake, so careful management of water—both where it should go, and where it shouldn’t—leads to some fascinating human-engineered structures. I like this image for the sense of depth, but also for the way that the unmodified hills rise above the human-produced forms in the fore- and mid-ground.
My favorite images are those that contrast (apparently) natural and human-populated places. Escaping all of the noise of the holidays to a hike in the desert has a certain appeal at this time of year.
Nothing makes the incredible scale of a western landscape apparent like some tiny people navigating the scene.
A sunset Christmas Eve drive through the less-inhabited parts of Coachella Valley has to end eventually. The palm trees mark the seconds of the drive back into town.
Brush and tire tracks in the North Palm Springs desert look extra-tiny beneath the enormous Christmas Eve clouds.
This array of wind turbines, silhouetted against the sunset and flashing their red warning lights, looks far more sinister in a way that contradicts its positive impact on renewable energy generation.
After being on display at Burning Man, Randy Polumbo’s “Lodestar”—a modified aircraft, effectively—has come in for a landing at Bombay Beach, on the apocalyptic shores of the Salton Sea.
I’ve developed some odd tradition for epic landscape photography at the end of major holidays (as in this Christmas image)—perhaps it’s something about wanting the day to last forever.
Night falls and the well-watered communities give way to desert landscapes on the outskirts of Coachella Valley.
If ever a reminder was needed that large swaths of Coachella Valley would prefer to be desert, the stark shift that occurs at the border where artificial watering stops provides one.
The Thanksgiving evening was perfectly clear, as late-autumn evenings in the desert often are, and I felt like I could see forever: stones and brush in the foreground, over the Pines to Palms Highway, across the irrigated valley floor, before slicing the final bits of sunlight off the tops of the Little San Bernardino Mountains.
Decaseconds 