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.
Tag: photography
Convenient Transportation?
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.
Drifting with a Camera Car
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.
Simon Stålenhag Snack Bar
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.
Turn and Burn
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.
The Atomium’s Cyberpunk Elevator
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 Atomium
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.
The House by the Dunes
This lonely cottage by the dunes and brush of a late-autumn Atlantic beach reminds me of a half-remembered setting from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold near the start of the novel, on the Dutch coast. There’s a lonely quiet to the image but the road and house suggest some respite on the horizon.
Bushnell Night Angle
The great glowing verticality of Bushnell Tower at night reveals the strengths in I.M. Pei’s original design.
Island Porsche
A classic Porsche in front of a classic New England clapboard home on Martha’s Vineyard looked so much like something out of a circa-1990’s Ralph Lauren or J.Crew catalog that I just had to rock some color grading to complete the editorial effect. Now where’s the tall man with the chunky sweater?
Edgartown Harbor Lighthouse
Down at the end of the long and windswept path to Lighthouse Beach and the Edgartown Harbor Lighthouse, can you spot the little figure of the walker between the bushes?
All Along the Coast of Martha’s Vineyard
Tiny details of docks and homes and lighthouses against the grand scope of a late-autumn Martha’s Vineyard coastline make this a image for which I would really encourage you to click through to the full-sized version on Flickr.
Weird Fog
A fog of Macbeth/Shakespeare/Weird-Sisters-level strangeness descended on Hartford last night.
Nissan Cloud
A black Nissan raising a huge cloud of white tire dust is already 80% of the way to being in black and white, so I finished the job.
Bicycle Pause: Amsterdam
No idea how this standard Amsterdam bicycle came to rest in the middle of a canal bridge, but the combination of transportation modes speaks to the Dutch experience pretty effectively.
Decaseconds 