HDR Photography
On the deck of the Wind Star, the arrival of dawn matched our arrival into the deepwater harbor of Maó. The details on either shore (captured in this more-than-30,000-pixel-wide panorama) are well worth clicking through to the full-sized image.
Though the Wind Star felt like a plenty-large ship while we traveled aboard her, docking at typical cruise ship terminals (an entirely novel experience for me) demonstrated that she was far smaller than common cruise ships.
Sun and optimism on deck for the departure of the Wind Star.
The Wind Star, eponymous ship of the cruise line, sits at anchor off the coast of Calvi, Corsica, looking like a relic of a different century—in contrast to the engineering choices inside her hull.
On a wickedly curving street beneath a dramatic Menorcan cliff, this simple crosswalk caught my eye.
The deep natural harbor of Mahón in Manorca has been in use for centuries and the small, charming structures along the waterfront have been preserved (with careful, direct action by the local population), leaving a (here’s my favorite adjective) Miyazaki-esque Mediterranean setting. The clifftop town above the harbor also makes for a perfect view from which to capture it all.
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.
Decaseconds 