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.
Tag: photography
The Biggest Music Club in Central Europe
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.
Tunnel Through a Building
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.
Rooftops of Lesser Town
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.
Muir People
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.
Football in the Snow
November snow means the football fields, like everything else in the North Country, need to be plowed.
Enormous Nozzle, Enormous Thrust
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
Lights in the Normandy Village
Farther on in spacetime from sabbatical, the details of the cozy Normandy Village apartment where we made our home shift into hazy legend.
Cobra in Profile
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.
Inhuman Scale
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.
Manhattan Rooftop Scenes
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.
Secret Seine Staircase
I’d never dare to suggest that an enormous stone staircase in a tourist-focused area of Paris would be a “secret”, but that glowing doorway below street level looks like some secretive club or spy rendez-vous.
Empty Dorms in Spring
When spring shades into summer and the students go home for break, the campus is oddly empty for the best weather it ever sees. The empty dorms feel a bit like the result of a very tidy zombie apocalypse.
Every Detail of the Bay
My favorite view of the Bay Area (and the view that first let me define the idea of the civilization gradient as an element of my photography) is layered up with loads of detail. Down in Berkeley Lab is the building where I worked on sabbatical, and across the Bay Bridge is the completed Salesforce Tower hiding in the marine layer. The differences, particularly from the last time I showed a very similar shot from the spring, are in nature: the high-altitude clouds have been replaced with empty skies and that rolling marine layer, while the green hills have shifted to a dry, highly flammable tan.
Water Tower Excavation in Heuvelton
This nineteenth-century water tower in the North Country hamlet of Heuvelton, New York is scheduled for demolition (or disassembly, really) to make way for its modern replacement. In the process of preparing the site, however, it was discovered that the original graveyard that was moved to make room for the tower was, uh, not so thoroughly moved as originally assumed. Now, biological anthropologist Prof. Mindy Pitre and her team are on site (beneath the oak tree) to properly finish the job. I joined her for an afternoon to photodocument the site and its tower before ongoing construction forever alters it.
