HDR Photography
As frozen rain bounces off the roadways of northern New York, I’m reminded that our town works truly do battle with the elements each winter. Floating high over their facilities when spring finally arrives, I feel like I’m looking over the encampment of a victorious army.
In the dusty smaller hallways of Prague Castle, arms and armor stand at attention. This particular combination of gauntlets and hilt stood out to me.
Iron Petrin Tower (tower than the Eiffel Tower, incidentally) looks out over Prague.
Perhaps it’s the excellent new Rian Johnson movie Knives Out, or perhaps it’s the new HBO adaptation of the His Dark Materials trilogy, but this case full of daggers in Prague Castle put me in mind of Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife.
While the rest of a wine-weekend gang slept in or drank coffee in their pajamas, I climbed the hill behind the house to catch this Saturday morning sunrise over Napa’s dormant vines.
Continuing on the juxtaposition theme from my last post, here we have the “BIGGEST MUSIC CLUB IN CENTRAL EUROPE” jammed into a tiny corner between buildings along Prague’s Vltava River.
The old buildings of Prague change at a glacial pace, as this tunnel through a building reveals. The pattern of the taillights, however, reveal the recent vintage: that saw-like pattern can’t be formed by old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, but rather by the rapid on-off of LED hardware.
The staircase up to Prague Castle will literally take your breath away, and not only with the view that is available if you lift your eyes from the steps to look over Lesser Town. That wall of gold in the distance is made of building facades on the Vltava River.
When my graduate school co-conspirators visited the Bay Area during sabbatical, we couldn’t avoid a trip to the Muir Woods to be back among the enormous redwoods. I won’t deny that I pretended for a moment that I was on Endor.
November snow means the football fields, like everything else in the North Country, need to be plowed.
Standing behind the F-14 Tomcat at the Aviation Museum of Kentucky, the brain has a tough time comprehending just how enormous the nozzles on the hot side of the jet engines really are.20
Farther on in spacetime from sabbatical, the details of the cozy Normandy Village apartment where we made our home shift into hazy legend.
The sleek shape of the Cobra made it my favorite helicopter as a kid. (Every kid has a favorite helicopter… right?) A contrast is revealed with the maintenance panels opened and the complicated mechanical components of the powerplant on display.
The absolute enormity of Manhattan’s buildings is sometimes inaccurately portrayed by their steep, vertical faces. The great wings of Westfield World Trade Center leave little doubt in the mind. Look at those two tiny people at the bottom of the image.
Given the catastrophic cost of real estate at the southern end of Manhattan, a look at the use of rooftop space reveals a sharp contrast: roofs are either lush garden spaces or barren mechanical utility areas. I had expected to see more “in between” spaces among the penthouses—casually or informally used rooftops. I guess nothing spends more than a few hours on a New York rooftop without a reason to be there.
Decaseconds 