HDR Photography
Striking modern architecture next to industrialization-era brick and ironwork makes for a dramatic combination. It’s also the bedrock style of my favorite cities, including New York and San Francisco. In this particular image, the sport bike and the small group enjoying breakfast at front add the perfect hint of scale.
Berkeley’s seasons are a weird, fractured, microcrystalline version of their East Coast equivalents. There’s a nice congruence between the variable season a given tree might be experiencing and the variable model year any street-parked vehicle might be representing. Having autumn foliage gently localized around this classic (if oxidized) VW Microbus makes for a delightful combination.
“Teenage” is a category that remains linked to California, and there are few places where the California/teenager overlap occurs more than in an older-model car jammed full of your best friends on a sunny Saturday afternoon in downtown Berkeley. There are plans to be made! We have to pick up that guy from the BART! What about hitting Grizzly Peak? Time to drive!
Like any college town, Berkeley is beset with pizza joints. Almost all of them offer a delicious slice, but a lot of those slices are, well, not really pizza. Deep dish so thick and dense that knife and fork are mandatory? All-organic cheese detonation without sauce? Pizza bagel? All of these can be mouth-watering under the right conditions, but quintessential crispy-yet-foldable slice of (New-York-inspired) pizza is found at Arinell’s in downtown Berkeley. The venue matches the food.
I’m on a roll with Datsuns lately. The crash protection and the reliability of a modern car may not be there, but what a face! Particularly when sitting on wider-than-stock tires and hiding out on some side street in Berkeley, this car has the potential for fun.
The sun-streets of California, I hear, are where longboarders got their start. That vehicle remains popular with the undergraduates of most colleges and universities, I’ve noticed, from snowy St. Lawrence to here in Berkeley. The bravery to venture into traffic on a bright Saturday afternoon is admirable.
(Or maybe I’m just jealous of the skill required.)
We’re on our way out of the North Country, headed for a sabbatical in California, but the little houses (first built for mill workers) of Canton, New York will be there to welcome us back.
The intersection of Hearst and Euclid was an everyday sight (and site for lunch) during graduate school. Just as daytime settings become otherworldly by night, chronological distance from those days have made the setting alien and exciting. How could this place ever have seemed normal?
Since moving from places like Hartford and Oakland to Small Town America, I will admit that I’ve become a bit spoiled when it comes to traffic. Anything less than an open road now feels like a traffic jam. The reality turns out to be just a little different.
There are three ways to interpret the title:
I’ve posted shots of the intense geometry of the Seattle Public Library before, but I thought this shot captured a new facet of its oddness: an ordinary if elegant entrance and ground floor that suddenly shifts to an impossible angle as the building rises.
A classic New York street scene: the charm of the Empire Hotel alongside the NYPD and and bags of trash. Maybe the old man’s flyers are right: could the world be ending? (Probably not.)
Can a building hide? Or surprise? Or sneak?
The Empire State Building, hiding at the other end of 34th St. in Manhattan, seems to support the possibility. The canonical modern New York street scene, one of luxury cars stuck in traffic and smoke from cooking street meat and old industrial buildings being converted into high-end condos, can still surprise. One step away is another scene built of different buildings and people in view.
Traveling back to California for the first time since I left in 2013, I realized I had forgotten the little but important differences: the streets are crowded with cars instead of trucks and the air is saturated with a different set of volatile organic compounds.
From another perspective and at another time, this photograph captures the same Omni hotel and Petco Park from one of my earliest Decaseconds posts, almost four years ago. How odd to be back again.
Even at the end of this winter-that-wasn’t, the North Country wouldn’t let us get away without gorgeous glaze ice and snow-packed roads. Is any day crisper than the one after an epic storm?
Decaseconds 