HDR Photography
Hundreds of miles apart from each other, I happened upon these two images of vehicles, paired with their owners, otherwise alone in an expanse of western America. On a clear day, the yellow pickup in the image below is almost lost in the brush.
By comparison, this Nevadan Jeep stands out amid the dusting of snow and descending clouds. Even its driver is farther away. The setting is so perfect that it might as well be a Wrangler advertisement.
Look at this big hill and tiny fence. Though not its original purpose, I like to imagine that fence as an attempt to hold back the advance of the hill.
This image resulted from the process of demonstrating color filters to my coworker. Colors, with black and white? Of course! The rich, dark sky and bright foreground in this picture result from (digitally) applying a red filter. My favorite part of that now-visible foreground is the large Chevrolet pickup, shoehorned into a parking space on a narrow San Francisco street.
In the sprawl of the greater Bay Area, with its networks of highway, rail, and water connecting major nodes, UC Berkeley remains a special location. The campus represents its own phase with boundaries where order parameters shift.
This seems like the time to post images of moored sailboats. Sunset at the Corinthian Yacht Club means, near the solstice, that the sailors are quieting down for the night.
During the summer months, Tiburon’s Coninthian Yacht Clubs hosts the Friday Night Race Series. Though images from last week’s race are coming soon, I was most struck by this scene of a sailor on a trimaran watching the delicate blue-hour colors above San Francisco.
New construction continues across San Francisco; from my perch across the Bay, I continue to watch the city evolve.
A little peek behind the curtain.
Commencement ceremonies have ended and the campus is quieting down to a mostly graduate-student-based buzz. The Campanile stands tall and mostly quiet—except, of course, for when the bells are ringing.
That skyline is recognizable, even shrouded behind 200 mm f/2.8 bokeh. Though many people in the Berkeley Hills watched this scene, and though I wasn’t the only one with a camera, the unique light-twisting effect of bokeh means that I’m the only one who captured this pattern and this moment. My favorite details are the individual pieces of grass, bright and sharp against the softness of the Emeryville background.
In the emptiness of Wyoming, big structures along the interstate are rare. When the temperatures are ultracold and the factory is emitting tons of vapor, that brings up a new level of interest.
Along Interstate 80, stretches of winter Wyoming are wide and barren like I wouldn’t have believed.
In a few stretches, mountains or wind farms crop up in the distance.
But it’s perhaps this image of an orange house, like something from a mid-twentieth-century landscape painting, that best captures the experience.
During last winter’s road trip from New York to California, we were struck by the sheer scale of the American West: one step off the Interstate drops you into an enormous expanse. At the edge of Wyoming’s Black Hills, there’s a Bob-Ross-ian grandeur to enjoy.
Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai in Manhattan towers above its neighbors and, for the most part, stands apart architecturally.
(Photographed the right way, it looks like some sort of cyberpunk corporate headquarters.)
Bay Area sunsets shift to the north in summer, where they’re best seen from the houses of the Berkeley Hills. There’s something delightfully Californian about a German sports car parked in front of a mid-century modern home on a ridiculously-graded road.
Decaseconds 