HDR Photography
St. Lawrence University’s campus has an “everything the sun touches is your kingdom” vibe—the school extends over almost an entire quadrant of town. Just under the setting sun is the most-frequented version of campus, but it continues to extend over the woods to this oxbow.
Two of my past St. Lawrence University students are working on their Ph.D.s at Berkeley and I discovered yesterday that one was giving her Graduate Research Conference (Berkeley’s version of a thesis defense, but earlier) while the other was in the audience. I’m very proud of both of them.
Understandably, this had me thinking about my experiences at Berkeley. In this picture from Grizzly Peak, the perspective folds together Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley. In the foreground, look at those gnarled trees—they’re weird but they’ve grown tall. I’ll take that visual metaphor for the grad school experience. I took this picture on Christmas Day in 2016, so I guess that makes these Christmas trees, too.
I cheekily posted this picture to Instagram with the caption, “Get ready for fall(s),” last weekend, but I have to admit I really am. Photographically, autumn means peak creativity for me in the North Country, including visits to places like this: Lampson Falls.
My favorite part of a huge cityscape view is the way the tiny details of buildings (windows, lights, roofs) slowly become less and less distinct as you look farther away. I was inspired to get a “real” camera all those years ago in part from a desire to takes pictures that gave the viewer a feeling of being able to “zoom forever” and always see more detail.
Libraries already have a capacity for bending time a bit (“I’ve been studying for how long?”), so it’s only appropriate for St. Lawrence’s most haunted building to have its space bent a bit as well (by, say, a fisheye lens).
One of Trinity College’s oldest buildings (Clement Hall, home to the Chemistry Department where I got my bachelor’s) is across from one of its newest (Raether Library and IT Center). From inside the modern surfaces and behind the modern windows, Clement looks even more Hogwartsian than it does typically.
The incredible architecture of Berkeley Lab, like the Molecular Foundry hanging out into the space of Strawberry Canyon, is implanted into an otherwise natural setting. In that sense, being there reminded me of a sort of real-world Jurassic Park. (The flocks of turkeys and herds of goats on the grounds were a bit less threatening than dinosaurs, thankfully. The mountain lions were a different story…)
Even with more than six million remains in the Catacombs of Paris there are apparently still absences in the patterns created by those filling the space.
Marine layer water clusters suspended in the air can always turn San Francisco pale, but the fuzziness of memory also layers over the time when Transbay Tower was under construction.
I’ve shown many parts of Berkeley’s Normandy Village, but perhaps not these square homes (that look like cubes with roofs jauntily capping them).
The Aviation Museum of Kentucky has an OH-58 Kiowa into which visitors can climb.
Standing in front of an F-14 Tomcat “in the titanium” at the Aviation Museum of Kentucky was a pretty metal experience. I couldn’t resist humming “Danger Zone”.
When I’m out in nature with my camera, I’m reminded of a quotation from Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s “Wind, Sand and Stars”, regarding his time as a pilot:
“Precisely because it is perfect the machine dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon our notice.
And thus, also, the realities of nature resume their pride of place. It is not with metal that the pilot is in contact. Contrary to the vulgar illusion, it is thanks to the metal, and by virtue of it, that the pilot rediscovers nature. As I have already said, the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.“
In the Normandy Village, even the back door to the fire escape and laundry room is weird and wonderfully overdesigned.
Brittany Village is, perhaps unsurprisingly, just around the corner from Berkeley’s Normandy Village where I last lived in California. It has plenty of quaint eurocharm, but I think the “original” copy of a European village in Berkeley remains the best.
