HDR Photography
Waking up early on a cold morning can be tough, but riders never seem to have trouble getting up for a show. (Caffeine seems to help!) I loved the moment of calm and intimacy between horse and rider in this particular image, and the comfort it conveys.
The combination of chestnut horse and bright red Coke can also goes a long way to making the scarlet and brown St. Lawrence color scheme appealing.
Spring may be here, but it was still 7ºF when I awoke this morning. Thinking back to the coldest I’ve ever been (and the appropriately Canadian/ninja response), this image seemed appropriate to convey the feeling of “spring” in the north.
The narrow depth of field exaggerates an image that flashed past me in an instant while we traveled: a few children, playing in the crunchy remains of winter outside a barn. Ignoring the safety orange hat and the electrical conduit traveling up the side of the barn, and this seems like an image that could have come from any point in the past 150 years.
After dark on an empty stretch of highway, the reflective signs become hypnotic.
Traveling through the Adirondacks means passing the semi-abandoned cabins that dot the roads. I particularly liked the image of a basketball hoop hanging above a driveway entombed in three feet of snow.
Safari is South Africa is already a lovely experience, but the sense of interacting with Nature one feels on an afternoon, just after a rainstorm with the air filled with petrichor, is superlative.
I felt like a single image couldn’t capture the feeling; the damp darkness of a rainy day is better conveyed in this acacia.
The Canadian Capital has this charming, European flair to it in the winter. Between the stone walls, steep hills, and canal locks (not to mention the bridge), I’m left waiting for a sophisticated spy thriller to begin.
This photograph is a double-case of finding interesting details by looking away from the obvious. On one hand, this subtler image was captured opposite an intense sunset over San Francisco. The color palette is heavy with pastels, but accented with a few harsh reds from Oakland in the distance. In the image itself, there’s a tiny building under the right-hand span of the bridge. Seeing something so (let’s say) adorably sized next to something so dominant and enormous makes for a charming contrast.
Continuing on the Ottawa theme, today’s image is much farther to the other end of the “clean——dirt” spectrum than my last. There’s something about the grimy copper colors of the bridge, the salty road, and the slushy sidewalk that speak to an alternate-reality, Judge-Dredd-esque, cyberpunky Canada.
Visiting Ottawa often means a visit to the surreal and somewhat overwhelming Château Laurier. The outside of the hotel, I’ve noted previously, is pretty impressive; the interior doesn’t disappoint, either. For all the polished-floor touches and deep wood paneling, I find the most charming (and perhaps old-school Canadian) feature of the scene is the portrait of Winston Churchill.
When it’s a snowy Friday morning and the ski slopes are calling, who can resist the urge to cut class and get to skiing?
Though most pictures show the San Francisco of gleaming buildings like the Transamerica Pyramid, there’s another San Francisco of a perfect grid of squat buildings clinging to undulating hills.
Dotting the road to Ogdensburg’s bridge to Canada are tiny, abandoned houses like this one. It’s rather charming, and just a bit sad, but mostly it reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, and the obversations that a society can retreat from the frontiers and back into the cities over time. Sprawl and civilization are not inevitable.
There are few natural features that look colder than a rushing blackwater river when the air temperature is below 0ºF. The convergence of this little reservoir to the far-off (and equally miniature) hydroelectric station neatly contrasts the frigid setting with the optimism of twentieth-century technocrats. (The Adirondacks are dotted with an improbable number of tiny hydroelectric stations.)
What says new life more than a summer wedding on a gorgeous day? (The groom was sticking his head out the window to check.)
Decaseconds 