HDR Photography
The steep-roofed Belgian structure in the distance (now T’ile Maines) is a relaxing venue on a Belgian island in Mechelen, but a foggy winter evening makes it look more like the sorts of charming/mysterious structures that populate the works of Roald Dahl and Hayao Miyazaki.
In December, our transatlantic flight to New York turning back near Greenland, spending hours in the air with an unknown mechanical error for returning us to the Madrid-Barajas Airport. After an all-too-brief but restless night in a mediocre Spanish hotel, we were back at the airport early the next morning for a second (and ultimately successful) attempt at an Atlantic crossing. Several hundred people waited to board. I looked out at the horizon; the landscape was strange, alien, surreal, but ultimately a lot more welcoming than the cold dark of the North Atlantic. The image will stay with me.
Relaxing with in the shade by the canal on a summer afternoon is excellent, but zoom in and you’ll see that this young woman is laughing along with her friend who is almost perfectly hidden behind her.
The impression of plantlife in every edge of the Netherlands was one I expected to drop away as we entered more urban areas, but the canals of Amsterdam, too, were lined with green.
The highly varied flotilla approaching the Dutch National Opera and Ballet speaks to a kind of imagined universality of classical art—where every citizen might gravitate to something high-minded.
A slice of life on an Amsterdam summer afternoon—café, busy streets, big clouds.
Travelers of all kinds pause for a moment in Amsterdam, and this long-distance bicyclist (see his touring rig hiding at the left side of the image) is no different. I like this moment apart, with a lone figure in the foreground but a massive crowd on the bridge and boat in the background.
Snow hit Connecticut last night, but for today I’m looking back on street photography from a surprisingly cool summer day in Amsterdam.
The call of a perfect summer afternoon on a bike crossing Amsterdam—dodging crowds, slipping from old building to new building, under a blanket of white clouds and green trees—sounds utopian.
Race-prepped cars are famously inconvenient modes of transportation, but when you need to get somewhere (with a folding chair) quickly, hanging from the door has a certain practicality.
I previously captured this camera car preparing for the action, but seeing it trailing a drifting Mustang in its very forward-facing grip-driving mode makes for an effective demonstration of the differences between the driving styles.
The retro-futurist art of Simon Stålenhag places intimate, perhaps even old-fashioned scenes in the foreground of images with strange, alien machines in the distance. A lone pair of nighttime snackers waiting at a slab-sided friterie trailer in the environs of the authentically 1950s Atomium represented such a real-world manifestation of the phenomenon that I had to stop and capture the scene.
This CSI5* speed class pushed riders to their limit; few managed the entire course with neither rail nor speed penalties. I was capturing photographs from the last turn in the course, where riders who were still jumping clean turning to blast down the final line to the finish. Watching them put on a final burst of massive speed was dramatic, as in this case with Hans-Dieter Dreher and his mount Jiniki.
When the elevator at the core of The Atomium was first installed in the 1950s, it was the fastest in Europe. I can attest that even decades later, the effect of its speed while rocketing upwards 100 m is unsettling. The surrounding bundles of data and power cables that have accrued inside the elevator shaft over the intervening decades has subsequently added a strongly cyberpunk twist to the experience. Gibson would be proud of the repurposed space: “The street finds its own uses for things.”
The scale of Belgium’s Atomium seems to be poorly captured in pictures—perhaps because it’s difficult to capture the structure and its surroundings together, or perhaps because the 102-m-tall structure so resembles something we might be more comfortable seeing at 10 m scale. The shrinking lines of sculptural lampposts helps a bit, but it’s night that I believe truly fixes the scale issue. See the band of red in the topmost sphere? That band is the array of full-length windows of the restaurant at the top of the structure, and the red light is the lighting inside.
Decaseconds 