HDR Photography
A rural childhood lends itself to stretches with zero requirements: impossibly muggy summer afternoons or frigid winter nights trapped inside. I spent many of those stretches drawing maps of fantastical places, and I can’t help but wonder if my current interest in aerial photography stems from the process of projecting real scenery onto my imagined childhood maps. This meandering oxbow near the Columbia River Gorge has that feel of a place perfect for a fort, doesn’t it?
There’s too much unsettling photography out there to limit my Halloween to just a single photograph! The image of a completely dark San Francisco (in the moment between the sun beginning to set and all of the headlights and streetlights turning on), with its specific skyline rising from the mist of the marine layer, just screams “post-apocalyptic cityscape.” Or do I detect a hint of Blade-Runner-esque “California of the Future” in the angles and orange colors? While I’m on the topic of future and past, I have a question:
Do you George Lucas your work?
This photography is one of the first that I ever took with a “real” camera, in the late fall of 2011. The RAW file was sitting quietly on my external storage drive, fallow and ready to live again. In comparing this image with the original approach I took to processing, I see enormous differences and enormous improvements—or at least an evolving artistic sensibility. I’d call this approach “George Lucasing:” going back to old work and updating or improving as my skills improve. And I’m not sure I like that it’s something I should do. Photography captures a moment, and needs a sense of finality. On the other hand, if I am spatially removed from a place (be it San Francisco or South Africa), without the immediate opportunity to return, can this creation be a healthier expression of nostalgia?
For Halloween, what better scary and spooky sight than an abandoned farm? The creepier part comes in the origin of this particular farm: this is part of the abandoned set of “I Dreamed of Africa” in Zulu-Nyala near Hluhluwe, South Africa. So this is an abandoned, decaying facsimile of someone’s imagined African paradise. Eerie!
I found myself wandering around McMenamins Edgefield (just outside Portland in Troutdale, Oregon) with some free time before a wedding ceremony, so I went exploring. I love the way the confluence of additions and annexes to buildings wind up producing these strange internal spaces; they do a lot to magnify the mystery of an already mysterious place.
Shooting candids at the Kentucky Summer Classic means some fantastic horse-show swagger. Though landscapes and architecture are more frequently my speed, I sometimes find a picture from my other work with so much style that I can’t help but include it.
Today’s photograph is from two years ago, and what was once my mundane walk home has now become a totally alien scene of science fiction flora and architecture. The overwhelming light of the windows and the sharp geometries imposed by noise reduction algorithms really add to the effect.
When denser, darker, smoother clouds than have ever been seen before appear over a science building (even if it’s MY science building), I find myself wondering if some mad science is afoot.
Nostalgia views the world from a distance but with specific acuity. A view from Grizzly Peak of the Berkeley Marina might look like a warm, buzzy vision of NorCal, but with my own memories I attribute specific instances and moments to every aspect of the landscape: Kites flying over Caesar Chavez Park. Stories of a ferry to San Francisco that once ran from the decaying jetty. Learning to sail on the tiny boats on the “left” side of the peninsula. Sailing from the Marina to Angel Island, crewing a professor’s 40-foot sailboat. Finding a place to live, driving up and down University Ave. from the hotel to the hills. Crossing the highway on the bicycle bridge for a long, flat, sunny ride along the shore. All of that experience is encoded into the image, but I’ll always be the only person with the key to decrypt it.
When red leaves are backlit, they seem to glow so unbelievably. HDR photography can turn this setting from charming to almost overwhelming.
Departing JFK International Airport over Jamaica Bay, with the Manhattan skyline glittering in the sunrise, brings to mind my favorite topic: the gradient between dense urbanization and “wilderness.” If there’s a consistent theme to my photography, it’s the desire to capture this gradient in a single image (as I sometimes have in other settings.) Even my wide angle lens couldn’t capture the whole scene, but here’s One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building alongside the wetlands of Jamaica Bay, with New Jersey and Brooklyn buffering and smoothing the divide to a gradient.
The overwhelming Adirondack puissance of the St. Lawrence Outing Club has produced a sprawling compound of housing and storage and additions and canoes and bikes and skis. I imagine the building as an outdoorsy batcave: behind every door is gear for another activity.
On the tiny, summer-camp-esque beach beneath Lampson Falls, the detritus of the falls washes up on the sand and makes for the most pleasing geometry alongside the stratified rock and the “pointy” trees.
A photograph should “work,” should have meaning, in isolation. I suppose that really means that it should work without any context other than shared culture. Without my words, you can know that this is a Japanese Garden (though perhaps not in Oregon), know that it’s an artificial simulacrum of some elegant natural setting—but can the sense of calm in being in that place be conveyed by the image? (I suspect that this aspect might be the easiest to convey.)
In the past week, I’ve explored the Adirondacks in autumn. This particular setting (just across the street from last week’s sea plane) is another irreducible representation of the glassy water, expansive sky, and intimate beaches of the region. Though we’re officially into fall, I’m pretty confident that these canoes and kayaks are going to see at least a few more weeks’ use. (Will they be dodging icebergs eventually?)
I want to contrast the bright fall colors from my last post with the broad spectrum of colors that can originate from different types of light sources used by humans every day. Where better than the neutral-colored stone of the Cathedral of Learning? Magentas, greens, warm yellows: emission and reflection can both offer a rich array of photons.
Decaseconds 