HDR Photography
The golden flares of sunset in San Francisco amp up the unreal qualities of the place. That wacky Lombard Street is only the third or fourth most interesting thing about the picture speaks to the profound weirdness. I hope the homogenizing influence of extreme wealth doesn’t change it too much.
The side streets of San Francisco let the sneaky photographer creep up on an unsuspecting building. The tallest building in the skyline looks oddly small in this context. I particularly like the details at street level—restaurants, people, and signs, all a world apart from the geometric perfection of the pyramid.
The longer I spend in small-town life, the more alien a view down the tree-lined streets of Seattle becomes. If the warm towers are a rare sight, the man crossing the street with his dog is a more normal image for me to concentrate on.
“Downtown” has a very different meaning in a small town. I love the repeating pattern in the second-floor windows of the buildings. Bright reds and blues will soon be covered with snow, but then perhaps I’ll take this same shot again.
The early-Saturday-morning light stabs down, under the metal bridge, to the precast concrete façade of the new and the ornate brick façade of the old. Overlooked in this corner of Seattle is a small metal door to an underground garage. I’m sure it’s perfectly mundane, but my imagination can’t cease telling me that some caped crusader’s high-tech ride is waiting on the other side. This is definitely where I’d hide my batmobile.
Waking up early at the Fairmont Olympic means peaking out the window to a contrast: the blue sky says day has begun, but the sodium-lamp-lit streets say night continues. The tan brick and window frame provide a logical grounding point for the viewer, placing you directly into the otherwise-fantastical scene.
A scene from this summer’s Pony Finals at the Kentucky Horse Park: This serious young rider is ready to, well, ride. Look at that focused expression.
The streets of Seattle are almost empty, early on a Saturday morning in August. The retro lettering and style of the Louis Vuitton display and the science-fictional curve of Rainier Tower above it make me think of 1970s-era film. A car chase must be just around the corner. (I suspect I’ve thought this about a post before, but as this is apparently my 600th Decaseconds post, that should be forgivable.)
Continuing my Seattle street photography trend from my last post, todays photo is a similarly odd vignette of West Coast life, from the punk/patriotic dirt bike to the painted brick to the elegant Jameson label.
I found this newsstand just around the corner from this recent photograph of Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington. I love the stark grid of his shirt against the curves of the contrasty cover, and the two lighting temperatures of the magazines and the street outside.
Portland’s Pearl District is colonized by construction like some sort of reverse-termites; shiny new buildings add to the skyline each day. As impressive as the reflections and the bridges and the gorgeous dawn sky is, I rather love the image of the man reading the paper in the bottom-right corner of the image. He’s literally on the edge of this dramatic image, but so thoroughly unfazed. Reading the paper and eating cereal has to happen sometime!
My co-author is the true Seattleite, and I began to understand the appeal of the place when I spent time there for a wedding this weekend. From atop the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, the view of uncanny Rainier Tower complements the wee cars in the streets below. Dawn is the time to gaze down the canyons.
We recently spent an evening by the Columbus Convention Center. As I explored the neighborhood, I was struck by the combinations of tiny, earlier buildings (lik the wee gray one in the center) and new, shiny, modern behemoths. Columbus seems to be in the process of figuring out if it wants to be Pittsburgh or Cleveland.
Pony Finals at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Kentucky make for excellent people-watching. Designer Charles Ancona’s preferred mode of transportation is his color-coordinated Ducati Monster.
My American town always reminds me of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” and I think his comment about the play also applies to life in the North Country: “[It] should be performed without sentimentality or ponderousness–simply, dryly, and sincerely.”
Decaseconds 