Rippling pool water, comfy lounge chairs, palm trees, and a beautiful blue sky all project a “vaporwave come to life” image.
Tag: photography
Done Fishing for the Day
The Lake Cahuilla reservoir on the periphery of Coachella Valley makes a charming setting for early-evening fishing just before the park closes.
Home in the High Desert
Look at that little home, perched atop a cliff above the high-altitude desert north of Coachella Valley.
The Future Wasn’t Already There, But Now It’s Evenly Distributed
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.
Sunset Over Denver I
Add a mile or so above the Mile High City and the sunset views are spectacular, even on clear winter nights.
Tall Stack
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.
Outdoor and Indoor Dining
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.
Desert Observatory
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.
View from the Relaxation Spot
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.
Nap Beneath a Tree
Does anything say “college life” more than an afternoon nap in the sunshine beneath autumn foliage?
White Hart in Autumn
This particular acute crossroads in Salisbury, Connecticut is home to the White Hart Inn, and it turns out that it’s photogenic in just about every season.
Integratron
Landers, California’s Integratron is said to be at the intersection of ley lines and underground reservoirs, and was originally designed to hold a device that its creator hoped would extend human lifespans. While I can’t say I’ve been able to verify any of that information, its stark white presence in the desert above the Coachella Valley is certainly striking.
While it was freezing and blustery outside, within the Integratron, the enormous parabolic dome of wood (with no metal used in its construction) was definitely warm and inviting. I’ll attribute this to thermodynamics more than supernatural forces.
Horses Among the Preparations
The background of this image—fleets of golf carts, tons of bedding, parking lots of trucks and horse trailers, plus busy grooms and working students—is a good reminder of the effort that goes into the equestrian experience happening in the foreground.
California Wind Turbine
An iconic image of renewable energy in California, if I do say so myself: scrub brush in the foreground, mountains in the background, and a huge wind turbine in the center of it all. I particularly like the way this particular shutter speed allowed for just a slight blur at the tips of the turbine blades.
Long Lake Boat House
The sight of a boat house on a remote body of water gets my eyeballs ready for an explosive speedboat entrance from a secret agent. I guess an Adirondack sunset is an acceptable runner-up prize.
