HDR Photography
The Downtown Berkeley BART stop was about to be closed for renovation when I last visited Berkeley. Have those changes been brought to fruition? Does that mean the end of the weathered bright entrances and weirdly sharp stairs? I know a quick search could answer these questions, but for just a moment I’m embracing the mystery.
Working through processing my back-catalog of sabbatical photos, I’ve finally come to the end of those I took in California. My semester of science and good food had come to an end, and now we drove back across the continent. The drive in December meant lots of snow-covered deserts and hillsides; summer was a bit different.
The human-made structures are as insignificant as you’d expect in the face of the great, empty American West.
Approaching the summer solstice, the start of fall-semester classes and their attendant labs seems far away, but a new class of St. Lawrence first-year students will be here before I know it.
This was one of the light sources students were interrogating: a sodium lamp, like the ones used in street lights (at least in the twentieth century—LED street lamps are becoming increasingly dominant now.)
Arriving at the one-year anniversary of the end of my sabbatical time in Berkeley, I’ve also reached the end of processing pictures that I took while I was there—though many more will be posted in the future. Our apartment was on the second flood of this build, where the screen of the same laptop on which I’m currently typing lights up the bottom-right corner of the window and the narrow slit of dark windows were over the kitchen sink where I’d cook dinner.
The long winter seems long behind us and campus is lush with flowering trees and grass carpets. Brush Quad, situated between St. Lawrence University’s oldest building (Richardson Hall) and its newest (Kirk Douglas Hall), looks particularly welcoming.
The rapids of Stone Valley diverge and reunite numerous times throughout their journey, and the spray that accompanies them turns the everyday rocks into smoothed, shiny, reflective triangles.
At the right time of day and with the right hints of weather, San Francisco looks extra futuristic. Home to the tech industry, I think the city usually merits the descriptor.
Despite its name, I’m sometimes surprised to see Portland functioning as a port for ships with missions beyond the city’s current PNW hipster cliché (i.e. Portlandia) image.
There are no crenelations, gates, or moats; this is not a place to hold off an invading force. Nonetheless, the châteauesque architecture of Berkeley’s Normandy Village seems like it could fairly be called a castle, filtered through generations of repeating architectural patterns. With each generation, the style moves farther from the functional reasons for its original existence.
The rapids of Stone Valley in Colton, New York have a certain stair-like repeating quality to them (at least for the 363-ish days/year during which the dam above keeps its spillway gates closed).
Farther along the river, the effect again repeats: stone ledges turn the rushing water into less-metallic slinky.
This isn’t a mere trompe-l’œil where a particular angle makes stair-like shapes appear in the stones and moving water. A view shifted by 90º confirms the structure.
The stealthy trimaran design of the USS Jackson looks like a sci-fi spaceship.
Watching the summer sunset behind Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and Marin is the perfect setting for a dinner picnic. This weekend is Memorial Day: the unofficial start of summer in much of the United States and the perfect time (i.e. time off) for picnics and barbecuing. Though this picture came from another big barbecuing holiday (Independence Day), the scene is likely to be replicated this weekend.
Under the redwoods’ canopy, Muir Woods is usually a pretty dark place. Where trees have fallen or hillsides disrupt the valley flood, sunlight sneaks through.
Given all of the natural or semi-natural textures in Muir Woods National Monument, the metal patches (held in place with nails that look like rivets on an early aircraft) in the pathway make for an odd juxtaposition.
This panorama of the San Francisco skyline (seen from across the Golden Gate in Tiburon) is transient in two senses of the word: because the sunset light takes on this set of specular reflections for only a moment, and because civil engineering has already transformed the skyline to some new form in the time since I took this picture.
Decaseconds 