HDR Photography
When the previous sponsor ended their support for Independence Day fireworks in Traverse City, Michigan, a group of locals formed the “TC Boom Boom Club” to keep the tradition going. That name is really something, but silliness aside, there are some northern Michigan challenges kind-hearted locals can’t fix—like the remaining sunlight in the sky, even after 10:00 PM.
Shooting summer landscapes in the Bay Area typically means swaths of gold, blue, and red. Bright pinks and magentas are much less common, but the jackets and graffiti of Grizzly Peak on this particular evening brought those novel hues.
A drone shot of the Cascade Diner (and its subterranean partner, the Buccaneer Lounge) reveals the reason for the institution’s name.
“Escaping from it all” may be difficult in the Bay Area, but an evening picnic in the Berkeley Hills gets pretty close.
The East Bay’s tree-lined streets make for a calming juxtaposition with “cloud city” wall of buildings and marine layer across the water.
Spending Independence Day in Traverse City, Michigan meant experiencing the TC Boom Boom Club’s (yes, really) annual fireworks display from the beach of the Grand Traverse Bay. Before they began, however, the families on the beach were making their own shows.
We’re hitting maximum summer and (in the east) a bonkers explosion of photosynthesizing surfaces; the small, new leaves of spring seem sort of tasteful, by comparison.
Something about the iconic combination of the Golden Gate Bridge, the marine layer, and Berkeley Marina, all bathed in sunset colors, makes me think of before-dinner drinks and cool summer breezes.
In the United States, the ubiquitous Neo-Gothic architecture of college campuses is an intentional throwback to far more ancient campuses in Europe. From a present-day perspective, of course, the “new” campuses of the east coast have existed for long enough that the anachronistic campuses now blur into a single time period called “old”. On the west coast, however, structures like Berkeley’s Sather Tower (a.k.a. the Campanile) are clearly artificial additions in the otherwise-contemporary landscape.
Going back over some of my favorite images with “Super Resolution,” there’s no way I was going to skip a second shot at my image that first captured the “civilization gradient” from nature through suburbs to dense urbanity.
In this sunset drone image, you can clearly see the bridges that connect SUNY Canton to the rest of its namesake village.
While there’s a real island in the distance on the left side of this image (Angel Island, in this case), the steep Grizzly Peak hills and the road over them transform hilltops into “tree islands” like the one on the right.
More adventures with Photoshop’s new “Super Resolution” machine learning algorithm, which quadruples the resolution of a processed image: a view of Berkeley and San Francisco from Grizzly Peak.
This uninhabited island sits at the center of Canton, New York. While it’s currently a park, the ruins on the island indicate its past as the site of water-powered mills that processed the products of the surrounding farmland. I’m still discovering more of its history, but I’m fascinated by the process that could lead an entire section of a town to be abandoned.
A trail, complete with cool stairs and abandoned ruins, on an island in the middle of town is something my childhood self would have been absolutely over the moon with. From a drone’s eye view, I think that sense of magic is effectively captured.
