HDR Photography
Johnson Hall of Science is an unusually green building—particularly for one filled with hoods and hazardous chemicals. It also happens to have a truly surreal geometry that messes with your head a bit, if you let it. The ceilings have been sloped to better reflect daylight, reducing the need for electric lighting. The result is this Alice-in-Wonderland-esque lab space.
Today’s photograph comes courtesy of Dr. Piper Klemm.
Alexander Bontemps shows Katie Riddle in the $50,000 Go Rentals Grand Prix at the Horse Shows in the Sun (HITS) Thermal Desert circuit near Indio, California. Katie Riddle is a 14 year old, 16.1 h gray mare who has competed at the international level for the United States in numerous competitions, including being a member of a winning Nations Cup team in Buenos Aires in 2010.
The North Country is still entrenched in winter. Maybe it always will be, for all I can tell. The roads are the salt-bleached bones of the once-living community; all we have left now is snow and storms and road-bones.
Today’s guest post comes courtesy of Zack Mensinger.
There are a number of places that I’ve seen lots of amazing pictures from and are on my “to-see and photograph” list. Antelope Canyon was very high on that list. I can gladly say it did not disappoint in the least. The canyons (Upper and Lower Antelope) are amazing from start to finish. Around each turn is another amazing scene with delicate light and forms. If you’re going with photography in mind, you should definitely visit both, but if you can only do one, I suggest Lower Antelope. As long as you have a DSLR and a big enough tripod, you can get a photographer’s pass that gives you two hours on your own. I mention a “big enough” tripod because they almost didn’t let me get the pass with my Sony travel model that stands at 39 inches! I can’t recommend Antelope Canyon enough, it’s out of this world.
Another in my very long line of photographs of small structures on beaches: this lone stick, keeping watch over a pool by the edge of the Indian Ocean. A massive storm the night before had filled the ocean with silt and covered the shore with enormous puddles—earth and sea had been mixed in a way that neither particularly seemed to appreciate (not to overly anthropomorphize or anything).
As you might expect for a charming town on the Indian Ocean, St. Lucia is heavily carpeted with folks ready to sell anything and everything (to tourists, of course.) The waves were crashing just beyond this dune—I could already smell and hear them—but on this little rise, under the shade of the coniferous trees, beach towels and toys were for sale. The brightly colored array, flapping in the breeze in a strangely orderly way, brought to my mind nothing more than some strange local variation on a Shinto shrine.
In the seaside town of St. Lucia, by the shores of the Indian Ocean, markets were filled with souvenirs for tourists from around the globe. The carving and painting and construction that went into this array was astonishing—I can’t imagine how many total person-hours are on display here.
This zebra mare isn’t part of a stallion’s harem yet (she’s young), so she hangs out, grazing and scratching herself on cars, by the tents of Zulu Nyala. Though by no means domesticated, she was remarkably docile (and uninterested in the behavior of the humans going about their daily lives around her.)
I’ve posted before on the strange properties of Berkeley and the Bay Area: the condensation of nature and suburb and weird architecture and intensity urbanity that compresses human interest and life into a tiny area. This high-density material seems to deform the very fabric of space a time, and make the distance of a few miles seem like a light year and the time of a decade seem mere moments. This photograph captures the folding and crinkling as it happens: crunch clouds, sharp trees, an array of buildings from multiple Berkeley colleges within the University, the stretch of Telegraph Ave. and the tiny shapes of Oakland (at the far right) in the distance.
The herds of impala in Zulu Nyala Reserve have almost no fear of the people who come to see them. During the wet start of the summer, that leads to scenes like this one: a verdant savannah hillside, dotted with impala and craggy trees and brushed by the breeze. I start to think that there could be no danger to ever disturb this peace—even if I could see the inevitable cheetah hiding in the grass.
Today’s post comes courtesy of Piper J. Klemm:
Mid-winter brings the Thermal horse show near Palm Desert, California. The whole scene is alien: the barren hills and the enormous, surreal jumps are watched over by the otherworldly poles of the lights. In HDR, the way these metal cylinders distort and section the landscape is fascinatingly exaggerated.
Bit by bit, my memories of Berkeley are vanishing. I can justify that this phenomenon is, at worst, neutral: the daily grind and the stupid time I missed the bus vanish, and only the weekends watching the sunset from the Berkeley Hills remain. Not to be trite: this empty, early-morning, fog-shrouded, post-apocalyptic view of the campanile is now my memory of the place, as well as an operational metaphor for that memory… If that’s not too obtuse.
In a moment of digression from my normal focus on landscapes: I’ve been inspired lately by the street photography of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who captured images of humanity in the “real world.” People living their lives. Perhaps it’s not traditional street photography, but for today’s photograph, I have this shot from Saturday night’s hockey game: SLU vs. Yale. Though the Saints lost, they looked great doing it. The ferocity of this imminent check captivates me.
African savannah isn’t the homogenous, steady monotony that it appears on the Discovery Channel. (Well, back when the discovery channel showed nature documentaries, anyway.) Dirt roads and hills criss-cross it, and fever trees like this one grow where more water is available. The yellow-green bark comes from photosynthetically active cells. The name comes from an interesting illustration of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: when early European settlers went near water, they tended to contract malaria (thus the fever). They incorrectly attributed this to the trees, rather than the mosquitos breeding in the water.
In the Twainesque memories of childhood in northwestern Connecticut, cannonballing into this naturally formed pool at the foot of a waterfall stands out:
The stone is hard and slippery. The water is transparent and glacially cold. The my feet touch a soft bed of fallen needles at the bottom. And when I finally climb out, the moss is soft and the sunlight warms me.
