HDR Photography
Neal Stephenson’s “Fall” suggests that that pattern of one’s childhood hometown is patterned deeply into the brain. This picture captures pretty much everywhere I could get to on my own (i.e., on my bike) when I was seven years old—so, basically my whole world at that point.
When New Yorkers take their dogs for a walk, it’s down narrow, cramped, sandy, salty sidewalks in a frozen hellscape… At least, in comparison with the Californians, rendered miniature by the grandeur of the landscape.
Beneath the mountain-wall around Denver, the only bright objects are the artificial lights and the highly reflective bodies of water.
High above the desert of southeastern California, the expanses of sand and stone look more to me like the surface of Mars than anywhere on this planet.
At one level, this is a calming, nostalgic image: two people fishing from a causeway over Lake Cahuilla reservoir in Coachella Valley.
The layers of reflections and horizontal lines, however, give it a very surreal, Dali-esque topology: reality doesn’t quite seem to be shaped correctly here. Space is folded in on itself.
Rippling pool water, comfy lounge chairs, palm trees, and a beautiful blue sky all project a “vaporwave come to life” image.
The Lake Cahuilla reservoir on the periphery of Coachella Valley makes a charming setting for early-evening fishing just before the park closes.
Look at that little home, perched atop a cliff above the high-altitude desert north of Coachella Valley.
My favorite William Gibson quote is, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” How we gauge futurity—or how we identify the traits we associate with future-ness—means that some places will have more “future” to them than others. A mountaintop in the Adirondacks might be pretty similar to its condition 100 years ago, while downtown Berkeley would be unrecognizable.
This image is a picture of the past, from the “future”: I wanted to print a tall, vertical image of Berkeley and the Bay but had (it turns out) never quite taken the one I wanted. I had taken the two pictures that went into making this image as part of a larger panorama in 2013 that never quite came out. Here in the present, I pulled in every technique in my arsenal—Adobe’s super resolution, Topaz AI noise reduction, frequency separation—to assemble two images from a circa-2010 16 MP Nikon D7000 into the 76 MP monster you see below. This one is definitely worth clicking through to full resolution.
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.
Is lunch better taken beneath the golden leaves of a tree in the open air, or inside a dining hall filled with friendly faces? The answer all depends on the season.
This mysterious small observatory outside Landers, California (not far from the Integratron) sticks out from the landscape—both figuratively and literally. Goings-on there strike me as excellent fodder for a science fiction novel.
Even without a full array of ancillary pillows, a spot to lounge by the pool on a cool desert evening seems like an enormous upgrade over the second half of winter in Northern New York.
Does anything say “college life” more than an afternoon nap in the sunshine beneath autumn foliage?
Decaseconds 