HDR Photography
This expanse of dramatic clouds, Petrin Hill, and the Vltava River was across the street from our hotel in Prague. While always a gorgeous view, most evenings brought rain instead of this kind of skyscape. I was lucky to find this scene on the final night of the trip.
Though St. Lawrence’s students are arriving to campus in a safety-mandated trickle over the next few weeks instead of a single-day flood, there’s still a sense of the snow-blanketed halls coming back to life. I love the energy of a college campus in full swing.
Along Prague’s Vltava River, this pattern of one-bird-per-piling appears to be very strict throughout the day. At sunset, however, the pattern reaches its most dramatic. I guess everyone wants a view.
It turned out that, after a week of bland gray skies, I wasn’t the only person attracted to Prague Castle on a beautiful afternoon.
While Prague Castle’s position on a hilltop is apparent from the south side, the opposite side of the fortress is equally isolated from its surroundings by a steep and wooded hillside.
Much like Manhattan’s Central Park, Prague’s Petřín is (in part) a demonstration of the will and effort required on the part of a city to maintain green spaces. Once they become part of the city’s identity (as in those aforementioned cases), they exist in a space orthogonal to modern real estate development.
I’ve looked across the Twin Lakes to this odd little stone tower for at least two decades, but have still never traveled over there to figure out what it is. Maybe it will stay mysterious forever.
Where sunset tapers into the rest of the sky—or when a sunset is so complete and overwhelming that the whole sky is transformed—there are interesting patterns to be found in the northwestern and southwestern edge. The evening of this image over Canton, New York, the result seemed particularly reminiscent of some Renaissance painting.
Up in the hills, Berkeley Lab possesses some different environmental features from the East Bay below. As sunsets like this finish the day, frogs begin to croak in the hills and the whole lab transitions from a bustling science facility to a nighttime wildlife preserve. Late-night buses are cautious for deer, turkeys, and even the occasional mountain lion.
I just thought the clouds in the sky looked super appealing last night.
