HDR Photography
More than any of the other Traverse City fireworks shots I’ve presented so far, I think this one captures the essence of summer: little Lake Michigan waves lapping at the shore, soft beaches, boats moored to piers, and the pair of people relaxing on the rocks in the foreground. They’re the most intriguing part of the image, to me: when everyone else is looking to the sky, what is interesting them more than the fireworks?
A wall of white water greets visitors to Laurel Falls. Can you spot the little magenta flashes of rhododendrons in the rocks?
Hiking through Stone Valley to capture a vibrant sunset over long-exposure-blurred rapids really only works if the sunset shows up for the party. What I found instead was a more quiet and contemplative view of early autumn in the Adirondacks.
I recently returned to this shot from 2015 to reprocess the original raw for a calendar of B&W images for St. Lawrence. While it may not have Iwan Baan‘s level of people in the image, the bicycle adds a nice sense of quiet, human scale to the setting.
The mists of Laurel Falls make the rocks just beyond its crashing torrents a perfect home for little flowers and mosses.
The new Sony camera and its drastically improved signal:noise meant the opportunity to capture the Aviation Museum of Kentucky freed from the constraints of tripods.
What better way to capture San Francisco than looking down California Street?
A summer sensory triptych: Warm sand, warm breeze, and warm colors from the July 4th fireworks.
The enormous Margaux Farm seems, like some equestrian Jurassic Park, to stretch from one horizon to the other.
It’s a cliché of landscape photography that the huge scale of a landscape can best be conveyed be including a human. Though there is indeed a person in this picture, I think Laurel Falls needs no help. Perhaps that’s because of trail experience to reach it.
While a telephoto view of fireworks and people can place the pair on even scale, the opposite—a wide-angle view that places the aforementioned pair in context—makes apparent just how small they are on the scale of the Earth.
Roots draped elegantly over rocks beside a burbling brook create the more-naturally-occurring equivalent of a Japanese garden.
Fireworks above the Grand Traverse Bay, as viewed from the piers. The true scale of fireworks becomes apparent when a long lens positions the explosions and the people closer together.
While my normal images capturing the “civilization gradient” tend to be more focused on space (traversing from nature to dense urban areas), I sort of like the way this image reminds me of a traversal through time, from the Stone Age to the Information Age. As William Gibson says, “The future has already arrived—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Or perhaps it really just reminds me of the vantage point from Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog“.
When hikers choose the trail this close to the river’s edge, they’re betting on the water level—will it be sloshing over the rocks and requiring a long detour? On this day, the hikers lucked out.
Decaseconds 