HDR Photography
David Lynch brings an edge of dark menace to his films; I can still remember the first time I saw Blue Velvet and felt the crisp edge of real and unreal disintegrating. In particular, the director’s visions of Small Town America and the underbelly of that beast (in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, particularly) felt notable in “downtown” Canton last week. With the sky aflame and neon lights in every window, the scene was about 15 minutes away from some Lynch-level insanity.
In Zulu Nyala reserve in South Africa, the sky is always dramatic and the hills roll on forever. The feeling is primal, that this place has been wild forever. (And hopefully always will be.)
I’ve posted before on the strange properties of Berkeley and the Bay Area: the condensation of nature and suburb and weird architecture and intensity urbanity that compresses human interest and life into a tiny area. This high-density material seems to deform the very fabric of space a time, and make the distance of a few miles seem like a light year and the time of a decade seem mere moments. This photograph captures the folding and crinkling as it happens: crunch clouds, sharp trees, an array of buildings from multiple Berkeley colleges within the University, the stretch of Telegraph Ave. and the tiny shapes of Oakland (at the far right) in the distance.
After an enormous Thanksgiving dinner, we stood out in the cold, under the stars, and gazed into infinity at the disk of the Milky Way. The world feels small and calm on a noiseless fall night. I don’t know that I’d ever recognized the galaxy before.
November snow can’t hold the title “unseasonable” in Canton, New York, but it adds a gentle blanket to the campus, just the same. The soft dusk ceiling of pastel clouds and the quiet campus converge at the end of the day.
Where earth meets sky at the edge of the horizon, the foothills of the Adirondacks oscillate under the autumn colors and I use increasingly baroque adjectives to describe the North Country.
With dusk arriving earlier and earlier each day, I feel that the time is right to extoll the glory of clouds stretching off to an infinite (or at least periodic) horizon and the first hints of yellows and oranges in the sky matching the hues of the trees.
On the dawn of SLU’s homecoming weekend, the sky was filled with appropriately dramatic clouds and the campus was dotted with all sorts of exotic temporary structures. (Or really only one sort: tents.) The attraction of a liberal arts campus on a crisp autumn weekend jumps from the screen.
The benefit of teaching early morning classes: I’m finally (routinely) up for the sunrise. Even when the morning is cold and my fingers don’t want to be operating a camera, the fall and the clouds and the trees conspire to make Johnson Hall of Science (a frequent subject) look like paradise.
What is “honesty” in photography? My goal as a photographer is to capture what I saw—the subjective experience of being in a single moment. I want to capture a “truth.” The process of taking a picture is projecting the reality around us onto a sensor and through myriad digital processes to create the photograph you see in front of you now. Every photographer has, in their pursuit of truth in imaging, some lines in terms of image manipulation that they will and won’t cross. HDR, for instance, is viewed as a “cheat” by some, and as a better approach to getting the true dynamic range of the human eye by others.
A less dramatic case, however, is the use of color in an image. Last night, the sky over Canton was this incredible, surreal, and otherworldly pink-orange color that was completely overwhelming and astonishing. When I noticed it out the window, I sprinted outside with my camera and captured the final, fleeting moments. I was in that moment. Nearly the same effect, however, could have been achieved with a simply pink photo filter. To me, this raises two issues:
At Gracelynd Hill, outside Santa Barbara, the late afternoon sun tickles the long grass in horse paddocks. If I were a horse, I suspect that an afternoon in the warm sun with an hillside’s worth of food would be a pretty paradisiacal place.
On a jet high over central Brazil, the cropped, divided, and cultivated land has a strange organge and purple color to it. Some fields are the broad circles of modern irrigation equipment, while others are odd heptagons nestled next to rivers and streams. From above, the landscape is alien. As an awesome side-note on Brazilian airlines: checking luggage is free and encouraged (so the overhead bins are empty), the airlines serve ham and cheese sandwiches instead of pretzels, and no one speaks a word of English.
A barn in the Northeast is a place of shelter and respite from frost and storms and snow. In the gorgeous Southwest, on the other hand, the barn is a gorgeous, open place with palm trees and big stalls.
Evening is finally rolling around, low tide has rendered the waves gentle, and the beach is pockmarked by the day’s footprints. If you let yourself get lost in the sky and the mild surf, the sights of people disappear and the mind wanders into the sea.
Tower cranes are, without question, the coolest pieces of modern construction equipment. In order to reach these heights, the cranes actually lift and build themselves! This particular crane is working on building the replacement to Campbell Hall (which we’ve previously photographed being demolished.) On this particular morning, the clouds aligned in just the right way with the arc of the crane and produced this composition.
Decaseconds 