Winter days in the desert are short enough already, but the tall San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains cut the light off even sooner. High up with a drone, there are still some final rays to be harvested.
Tag: Sky
Another Overheated Fall in Clement
The first weeks of school during my senior year at Trinity College, all the way back in 2007, were memorable to me for a lot of reasons; one of those was because it was just unbearably hot for a couple of weeks. Now, having returned to campus as a faculty member, I’ve apparently brought this weather back with me. The mostly-un-air-conditioned Clement Chemistry Building is once again my home—but this time, my office has a window unit.
Cliffs and Sky: Mohonk
A big dramatic sunset sky and lake reflections provide great context to the wall of stone that is both Mohonk Mountain House itself, as well as the cliffs on which it rests.
Lake Mohonk in the Clouds
The line where the crown of trees around Lake Mohonk gives way to the much-farther-away trees of the valley beyond looks like the sort of trompe-l’œil that might, these days, be generated by a glitchy machine learning algorithm. In this case, however, it’s just down to the unique mountaintop-lake location of Mohonk Mountain House
Big Kentucky Skies Above
Tranquil summer fields beneath a vividly hued sky make for a perfect Kentucky landscape.
Los Angeles: A Blade Runner Morning
Though it may lack the verticality of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles in 2019, the cloudy skies and slightly sinister oranges put me in mind of the film’s iconic imagery.
Skyhook Above Key West
The New York Times, ever the Gen Z style-watchers, have decreed 2000s-era point-and-shoot cameras and their attendant nostalgia to be the next big thing. I was inspired to go back to my own point-and-shoot-shot originals from the era, and uncovered some surprisingly good shots that I’d somehow never before considered. Just look at the tower-like cloud in this sunrise from a 2005 trip to Key West; how did I miss this shot?
Wind Farm
The iconic arrays of white wind turbines at the northern end of Coachella Valley scatter whatever color of light is available—quite a blue situation as the sunset fades over the mountains.
Christmas Eve Clouds Above the San Jacinto Mountains
Fields of wind turbines in the California desert may seem like a futuristic addition, but a recent viewing of Rain Man (from 1988) reminded me that there have been wind turbines in this area for decades.
Red Eyes of Wind Turbines
This array of wind turbines, silhouetted against the sunset and flashing their red warning lights, looks far more sinister in a way that contradicts its positive impact on renewable energy generation.
What Planet Is This?
High above the desert of southeastern California, the expanses of sand and stone look more to me like the surface of Mars than anywhere on this planet.
The Future Wasn’t Already There, But Now It’s Evenly Distributed
My favorite William Gibson quote is, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” How we gauge futurity—or how we identify the traits we associate with future-ness—means that some places will have more “future” to them than others. A mountaintop in the Adirondacks might be pretty similar to its condition 100 years ago, while downtown Berkeley would be unrecognizable.
This image is a picture of the past, from the “future”: I wanted to print a tall, vertical image of Berkeley and the Bay but had (it turns out) never quite taken the one I wanted. I had taken the two pictures that went into making this image as part of a larger panorama in 2013 that never quite came out. Here in the present, I pulled in every technique in my arsenal—Adobe’s super resolution, Topaz AI noise reduction, frequency separation—to assemble two images from a circa-2010 16 MP Nikon D7000 into the 76 MP monster you see below. This one is definitely worth clicking through to full resolution.
Shores of Lake Cahuilla
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.
California Wind Turbine
An iconic image of renewable energy in California, if I do say so myself: scrub brush in the foreground, mountains in the background, and a huge wind turbine in the center of it all. I particularly like the way this particular shutter speed allowed for just a slight blur at the tips of the turbine blades.
Breakfast at Sunrise
A summer sunrise accompanies many breakfasts when horses are involved, but I have to admit that I prefer mine with less grass and more eggs.
Decaseconds 