HDR Photography
The first organisms to shift and adapt to a new season have always seemed to me like its harbingers. Here in the North Country, I’m noticing the first buds appearing on the maple trees—several weeks after their sap was harvested to make some delicious New York maple syrup—but back in the autumn, those same trees were the first to display their autumn foliage.
While my normal images capturing the “civilization gradient” tend to be more focused on space (traversing from nature to dense urban areas), I sort of like the way this image reminds me of a traversal through time, from the Stone Age to the Information Age. As William Gibson says, “The future has already arrived—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Or perhaps it really just reminds me of the vantage point from Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog“.
The hike to Laurel Falls brought a mix of sand and stone (and sandstone?) in its geology that differs from the Adirondack settings that I’m most used to. The mixture of geological features and stunted trees in the setting has a calming “natural equivalent of a Japanese garden” quality to it that I really appreciated.
In the weirder hills of the Bay Area, back yard detritus falls alongside stones pulled into position by ancient glaciers.
California coastline is so much bumpier and more dramatic than the eastern locations I grew up with. Can you spot the two tiny people on the left cliff, overlooking the water? Nothing like a couple of tiny people to provide a sense of scale.
Though it’s hours downstate from where George Lucas found his forest moon of Endor, Muir Woods packs the same enormous, wet redwood trees and lush vegetation that made the fictional planetoid so memorable. To have “spent” so much of my childhood wandering around on that other world (in my imagination), only to find myself really there, proved to be a spectacular treat at the end of my time in California.
I went down to the beach to try out my new Christmas present on this fine PNW morning. I’ll have to admit that I constructed the mini-cairn myself, but I thought the texture in the rocks and on the rock surface was cool so I decided to post it anyway. I might have to try to pose things and create shots more often.
On the beaches of Florianopolis, the waves crashed on the broad black boulders and the sun dropped into the hills behind me. Not another person was evident, the water was impossible blue, and I said to myself, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
Saturday isn’t a normal posting day, but I was so excited by this shot that I thought I’d bring you guys a bonus. I’m currently in Florianopolis, Brazil, home of (they claim) the best surfing in the world. The waves weren’t quite that impressive yesterday, but they were pretty close. The blue green-ocean, black rocks, and golden barnacles make for the perfect “Royal Surf.”
An enormous, moss-covered stone mediates the meeting between pathway and stream, deep within the Nitobe Memorial Gardens at the University of British Columbia. Though the calm pond and the massive entrance have given a broader idea of the Gardens’ feel, I really like the calmer, more compact corners. These little areas seem like the perfect place for a kami to live.
Decaseconds 