HDR Photography
We were in Traverse City, Michigan, during last year’s Fourth of July celebrations. Fireworks over the Grand Traverse Bay have some added drama, but the area is so far north (and west in its time zone) that the sky still hadn’t fully darkened.
After the main show has finished, private citizens produce their own displays up and down the beach.
Dream-logic usually stays confined to dreams, but this swing in the Salton Sea appears fully isolated and separated from reality (while still existing within it); I’m reminded of an extremely low-rent version of Itsukushima Shrine.
After being on display at Burning Man, Randy Polumbo’s “Lodestar”—a modified aircraft, effectively—has come in for a landing at Bombay Beach, on the apocalyptic shores of the Salton Sea.
Strange sunlight geometries at dawn make for rare reflections on the hull of this ship.
At one level, this is a calming, nostalgic image: two people fishing from a causeway over Lake Cahuilla reservoir in Coachella Valley.
The layers of reflections and horizontal lines, however, give it a very surreal, Dali-esque topology: reality doesn’t quite seem to be shaped correctly here. Space is folded in on itself.
The Lake Cahuilla reservoir on the periphery of Coachella Valley makes a charming setting for early-evening fishing just before the park closes.
Apparently the original Lake Cahuilla was a prehistoric lake in the Coachella Valley; its modern recreation is a reservoir in the hills outside town. The relationship between humans and nature in the region is well-encapsulated by that point of comparison.
Seeking to print some images for a tall, narrow section of wall near a window in my office, I realized that I don’t shoot vertically very often. Perhaps that comes from what originally drove my interest in photography—making cooler desktop wallpapers for my computer. I traveled back to 2013 to find a vertical shot that really tickled my fancy (though luckily Adobe’s Super Resolution was up to the task of upsizing for printing.) The warm sodium-vapor-and-neon glow of San Francisco’s Embarcadero (stacked with the Transamerica Pyramid and Coit Tower) are a moment frozen in time, if not least because the switch to LED streetlights is totally changing the hue of an American city at night.
The sight of a boat house on a remote body of water gets my eyeballs ready for an explosive speedboat entrance from a secret agent. I guess an Adirondack sunset is an acceptable runner-up prize.
A likely astonishing number of my childhood’s imaginary forts and escapes were on islands. Though I have no idea why, the present-day result is that my head snaps to the side with every Adirondack island I pass. What adventure could be happening there?
As we pass the shortest day of the year, I looked back to one of the longest: an endless evening, stretching out over Long Lake in the Adirondacks.
I know they both have their shape due to the same causes (i.e., physics, gravity, etc.), but it sure is convenient that the wings of this seaplane and the shore behind it so tidily align.
Trees frame the sunset at Long Lake.
Thanksgiving in California, for some, means camping on the shores of the Lake Cahuilla reservoir.
After the big Traverse City fireworks show over Lake Michigan, Americans on the shores continue to set off their own fireworks. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is pretty much the equivalent of kids in the movie theater parking lot hitting each other with plastic lightsabers after a Star Wars movie lets out.
Decaseconds 