HDR Photography
I sometimes reprocess older pictures when I find some new approach or something special in an image that wasn’t there before. This picture is a bit different—though I captured it at this time seven years ago, I found that I felt no urge to reprocess any part of it. I was happy with it then—though apparently not enough to post it until now—and I’m impressed with it today.
Each Sunday morning during my 2017 sabbatical, I would start a load of wash in the apartment building’s single shared washing machine and head to Philz Coffee on Shattuck (don’t look for it—it’s not there anymore). I’d stand on this sunny corner in the perfect weather with an enormous coffee and watch the world for a minute… Before heading back to change over the laundry.
I wasn’t surprised to find a plethora of churches in Paris, but I was surprised by their array of designs. This first example neatly abuts the sidewalk, filling its lot.
By comparison, this next example is set back from the street and exhibits a vertical reflection plane.
This last case has a wholly different geometry and stonework hue. Am I even sure this is a church? Christian imagery appears on so many buildings.
In an otherwise carefully symmetrized Parisian setting, I wonder how this very high-entropy chair agglomeration formed? They aren’t set in a ring for people to chat, or even in a way that allows all of them to be used. Perhaps the grounds crew clustered them to make space for their own maintenance activities?
Though I complained about the mud of Parisian pathways, there is something perfect about the bright morning sun reflecting off the pale material.
Even on a chilly weekday morning in late November, this Parisian street market was busy. The narrow cobblestone streets were busy with shoppers.
The narrowness of the streets is really apparent at a corner, where even a wide-angle lens can’t open them up. (I did appreciate the mild irony of travel across the planet to find a corner Mexican restaurant that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Berkeley.)
A late-fall storm slicked the stones of Les Invalides and the sidewalk across the, uh, moat from it.
When evening arrives in autumnal Paris, the limestone city shifts from white to gray and the shops that once blended into the background become beacons.
Cobblestone side streets and traditional architecture find themselves juxtaposed with modern expanses of aluminum, steel, and glass on the streets of Paris.
The limits (practical, historical, and modern) on Parisian architecture make every street so dense with detail that glancing down one while passing left me moving on with a longing to explore.
I took eight years of French classes as a middle- and high-school student, and those courses’ textbooks inevitably had charming pictures of Parisian locales throughout. In trying to cover a wide range of French experiences, those books tended to show “everyday” life alongside the expected pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, and so I came to associate all of these images with a sort of “imaginary,” idealized Paris.
Imagine my surprise when I arrived in France and found that it looks exactly like my books.
An early winter afternoon on a Parisian street means the minimal aliquot of sunlight peaking between buildings and turning the pedestrians to silhouettes. School just let out in the 15th arrondissement and parents walk their squads of enfants home.
The homogeneity of Parisian streets seemed a little bit anomalous to me until I visited the Catacombs and came to realize that much of the stone making up the city had been quarried from directly beneath it. The cave-ins and collapses that this eventually produced demanded the project of stabilizing these artificial caverns and ultimately made room for the human remains that now occupy them.
Capturing pictures of the everyday and mundane details of living in a place as odd as Berkeley’s Normandy Village means that I can look back to the little details. This maroon fire escape served as the back door to our apartment, but also easy access to the shared laundry room—and thus a route I frequently traversed, trying to find a time when the machines were free.
Down the tiny alleys, side streets, and driveways of Berkeley are all kinds of odd old garages. My favorite details of these structures usually come down to scale; the driveway tracks and garage measurements were clearly built to be just large enough for the cars of the period. As American vehicles have grown larger, they now appear comically mismatched with anything but a vintage car in the scene.
Decaseconds 