HDR Photography
We were in Traverse City, Michigan, during last year’s Fourth of July celebrations. Fireworks over the Grand Traverse Bay have some added drama, but the area is so far north (and west in its time zone) that the sky still hadn’t fully darkened.
After the main show has finished, private citizens produce their own displays up and down the beach.
Fireworks are lovely displays of chemistry and physics in action on their own, of course, but there’s an extra dimension of enjoyment from being part of a crowd and feeling the shared excitement.
The background of this image—fleets of golf carts, tons of bedding, parking lots of trucks and horse trailers, plus busy grooms and working students—is a good reminder of the effort that goes into the equestrian experience happening in the foreground.
A summer sunrise accompanies many breakfasts when horses are involved, but I have to admit that I prefer mine with less grass and more eggs.
The sight of a boat house on a remote body of water gets my eyeballs ready for an explosive speedboat entrance from a secret agent. I guess an Adirondack sunset is an acceptable runner-up prize.
A likely astonishing number of my childhood’s imaginary forts and escapes were on islands. Though I have no idea why, the present-day result is that my head snaps to the side with every Adirondack island I pass. What adventure could be happening there?
The layers of fields, tree lines, bars, and hillsides that make up central Oregon remind me of the picturesque bucolic settings of Miyazaki movies.
As we pass the shortest day of the year, I looked back to one of the longest: an endless evening, stretching out over Long Lake in the Adirondacks.
The summer grass harvest in central Oregon makes for a sudden and dramatic shift in the geometry of the grass… To the viewer, it’s the parallel rows, though to the blades of grass themselves, I have to assume that the sudden shift to being parallel to the ground is more meaningful.
Rows of vines have been carved into the hillsides of central Oregon, with the lines of evergreen trees marking what came before.
I know they both have their shape due to the same causes (i.e., physics, gravity, etc.), but it sure is convenient that the wings of this seaplane and the shore behind it so tidily align.
Trees frame the sunset at Long Lake.
The William Gibson quotation, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” came to mind when I photographed this rusty shed/barn and the moon (where humans have walked) in a single shot together.
Even with advanced warning, I wasn’t really ready for the eerie gradients of cloudless central Oregon sunsets in the summer; they remind me of those rover-captured images of sunsets on Mars.
Good landscape photography is all about finding the perfect vantage point and being patient. Sometimes, however, real life demands a bit more serendipity. While there are incredible views to be had in the Adirondacks, there are also long sections locked between walls of forest. When there’s a once-in-a-summer sky overhead, patience gives way to reaching a lake before the moment disappears.
Decaseconds 