HDR Photography
Heading back to the mainland after a Thanksgiving on Martha’s Vineyard, I captured this panorama from the upper deck of the Steamship Authority ferry. The width of our decaseconds homepage doesn’t do it justice; I recommend clicking through and zooming in to see all of the details on Flickr.
This bucolic Dutch morning puts me most in mind of Iain M. Banks’s science fiction utopias. That may sound “out of pocket,” but allow me to explain: His far-future settings often feature people who are choosing intentionally charming but low-tech lives doing what they enjoy in beautiful settings. These boaters traveling down the Vechte feel part of the same vein. Though they live in one of the most advanced countries on Earth, they can still choose relatively simple experiences and ways of living.
Strange sunlight geometries at dawn make for rare reflections on the hull of this ship.
Reflections from the surface of Lake Michigan place fireworks on the same scale with the 80-year-old tug boat William C. Selvick. I particularly like the way the small buoy/float in the foreground is placed within the fireworks’ reflection.
Part of me wants to imagine that watching fireworks from the stern of a WWII-era tug would be a perfect summer experience… But another part wonders about the chipping paint and rust, hard corners and suspects that there might be some subtleties to perfecting the viewing location.
Views like this one, capturing the marine layer rolling across the San Francisco Bay towards the Port of Oakland, are the kind that first attracted me to photography. I took this picture nearly four years ago, during my sabbatical to the Bay Area, when I was still shooting with my Nikon D7000 (already antiquated tech in 2017); I can’t want to be able to safely revisit Berkeley’s Grizzly Peak to capture more cityscapes with my new Sony a7R IV.
Though the Tom Clancy vibe of the USS Jackson may not fit with every part of Portland, Oregon’s hippy vibe, it was conveniently moored across the river from the twin towers of the Oregon Convention Center with which it shares a certain angularity
Despite its name, I’m sometimes surprised to see Portland functioning as a port for ships with missions beyond the city’s current PNW hipster cliché (i.e. Portlandia) image.
The stealthy trimaran design of the USS Jackson looks like a sci-fi spaceship.
Though I’m sure both the homes and the boats of Tiburon cost dearly for their charming setting, it’s easy to forget all of that when the sun is going down and a cool breeze is blowing in the from the San Francisco Bay. That little gray house in the middle with all of the little extra architectural details is my favorite.
With the weather above clear, midday in the bay is a nearly shadowless moment of odd geometry. It almost looks like a rendering from a computer simulation where the artist was uninterested in spending the time to model the shadows.
Two structures (ship and bridge) designed to cross water, though over very different length scales. The two-centuries-old advances in metallurgy that allow for steel production at this huge scale still amazes me.
For the stealthy, angular trimaran exterior of the littoral combat ship USS Jackson, peaking inside the ship reveals a more mundane interior (look, a forklift!) that seems oddly pedestrian.
Tomorrow marks the first day of classes for St. Lawrence’s Fall 2017 semester, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to look back at the strange sights of summer. The cutting-edge stealth trimaran USS Jackson is here juxtaposed with the sign for Portland, Oregon’s Old Town. Hippie holdouts in Portland seem like odd companions to a stoic Navy vessel.
This week, Portland was visited by the US Navy ships USS Bunker Hill (the missile cruiser in the background) and USS Jackson (the stealthy littoral combat ship in the foreground). The futuristic structure and military aesthetic makes for odd juxtaposition with Portland’s Old Town/Voodoo Donuts reality.
Decaseconds 