HDR Photography
The old buildings of Prague change at a glacial pace, as this tunnel through a building reveals. The pattern of the taillights, however, reveal the recent vintage: that saw-like pattern can’t be formed by old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, but rather by the rapid on-off of LED hardware.
Given the catastrophic cost of real estate at the southern end of Manhattan, a look at the use of rooftop space reveals a sharp contrast: roofs are either lush garden spaces or barren mechanical utility areas. I had expected to see more “in between” spaces among the penthouses—casually or informally used rooftops. I guess nothing spends more than a few hours on a New York rooftop without a reason to be there.
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.
Decaseconds 