HDR Photography
In Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood lies Seattle’s Discovery Park, formerly Fort Lawton. The park still contains the vestiges of the old military installation including this radar dome, which looks sort of out of place in a municipal park. This was taken just after one of Seattle’s characteristic spectacularly colorful sunsets.
Today has been swamped under constant, freezing barrage of rain that carries dreariness in every drop. I prefer to remember the campus as it was in the last moments of aumtun, when one last sunset blazed through the crisp air.
A friend in northwestern Connecticut had me out to his property to photograph this amazing, craggy, ancient Linden tree. Vines cling to the heavy, sprawling shell of the tree, and it’s not a stretch to imagine fairies flitting between the leaves. Nothing captures fantastical rays of light like f/22 aperture. Every ray and every bent photon is transmogrified into beams and rainbows from the dimension of quantum uncertainty.
Like Manhattan, San Francisco is largely trapped by water. Like Manhattan, the city has preserved large swaths of “natural” space (e.g. Central Park, Golden Gate Park) in that hyperdense urban mass. The Mediterranean climate, youth, and topographical preposterousness of San Francisco give it a unique (pardon the neologism) architexture. Looking west from the trees of Telegraph Hill, over Russian Hill and on to the Presidio and the Golden Gate Bridge, the cross-section of environments complement each other. My mind still struggles to see the towers of Russian Hill in the same image as the inhospitable rocks of Marin.
With dusk arriving earlier and earlier each day, I feel that the time is right to extoll the glory of clouds stretching off to an infinite (or at least periodic) horizon and the first hints of yellows and oranges in the sky matching the hues of the trees.
I suppose part of the reason that I appreciate landscape photography is its ability to capture a perfect, transient moment of incredible beauty. Of course, on some evenings (such as this one), the weather and environment just won’t cooperate. (I nearly titled this photograph “Boring Sunset.”) As photographer, I can put myself in the right place at the right time, but I still need reality to do its part.
Down the road (and an hour later) from here, the grass harvest was continuing into the pastel-hued evening. The particulates kicked up by their work made this sort of localized haze that refracted the last sunlight to these incredible colors.
The topology of central Oregon at sunset is really very special: the land somehow has that “falling away beneath you” feeling of standing on a hilltop, that “in the hollow” feeling of standing in a valley, and that “goes on forever” feeling of standing on a plain all at the same time. Combine this with the variety of surfaces and textures to experience (gravel, grass, tarmac, wood, lake, sky, woods), and the experience becomes some hyperdimensional superposition of places and moments in time. With just the right car for the particular evening, you have a recipe for perfection.
Outside Vancouver (the city) are the hillsides, dotted with homes and apartment buildings and, farther north, massive rocks. (That’s a pretty rare combination.) The difference between the soft, welcoming pink hues of the sunset and those massive hillsides (with some lovely evergreens in the foreground) is stranger, the more I think about it.
This picture also illustrates the biggest difference I’ve encountered since moving from the west coast to the east: the environments are less staggering and overwhelming, but the skies (and the buildings) are much more so. I’ve had to reorient the way I shoot to account for it.
Motel, bar, AND diner? What more do you need? The Cascade Inn and Restaurant in Canton, NY has that feel of a building from the post-WWII boom that has remained untouched since its construction. Its charming position over the Grasse River makes it a lovely place to see the sunset.
I love that time of the evening when the earth is dark but the sky is still blue with just hits of orange and red and the clouds have just a little pink hue.
I often talk about the “civilization gradient:” the distance required to go from high-density urban land all the way to empty, rural space. Depending on when a given area modernized and switched from, say, horses to cars, this distance can vary drastically. In “older” parts of the US, like the east coast, the gradient was largely established by feasible distances for travel by horse. On the west coast, an area largely developed after the advent of the car, this distance is usually much longer. The best exception to this is the Bay Area, where various parks around the “lip” of the Bay’s “bowl” effectively compress the distance.
In today’s photo, the whole array of Bay Area landscape is visible: the forests and trails along the peak, the industrial buildings of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the quasi-sprawl of Berkeley and Emeryville, and the full urban metropolis of San Francisco at the edge of the clouds.
The Sun never quite cooperates, even when it’s at its loveliest. Winter means stark sunsets behind the Golden Gate Bridge or San Francisco itself; summer typically means only foggy nights. This was a rare occasion with broad cloud-wings in the upper atmosphere, but in early summer, the Sun drops behind the hills to the north.
There are few better spots to catch a sunset from in the bay area than Grizzly Peak in the Oakland/Berkeley hills. When the sun’s going down, drive on up and stand on a stump to catch a glimpse of the show that is the evening sky.
Far along the beach, the Atlantic waves crash against Brazilian stone. The Sun has just dropped behind the horizon, and I’m standing on these steps beyond a strange little pseudo-bridge and this odd sculpture. To this day, I’m still not sure whether it’s functional, or purely decorative.
Decaseconds 