Vancouver Sky

There’s something magnificent about the views around Vancouver of the hills and the water. There’s something even more amazing about those same views around sunset when the sky just absolutely fills with color. For these reasons, among others, Vancouver’s got to be one of my favorite places on this planet.

That and if you walk around long enough you start to recognize locales featured in MacGyver.

Vancouver Sky

The Chapel

Trinity College’s massive Neo-Gothic chapel is enormous and imposing and an utter masterpiece. Though the school has no official religious affiliation, the campus centers on the building both geographically and conceptually. In these final moments of the day, as the sun sets and paints lovely golden shadows on the structure, I appreciate how the building achieves this.

The Chapel

Duchess Sunset

Sunset over New York’s Duchess County (as seen from the northwestern edge of Connecticut) glazed the land with an epic but bucolic light. The fields stretched out under a dusting of snow and Christmas lights glinted in the distant houses. The icing on the cake was the smell of woodsmoke on the evening air.
This is what New England is all about.

Duchess Sunset

San Francisco Sunset

I feel like there’s a very set picture of what San Francisco looks like to people, the skyline that is depicted is usually the financial district or something including Alcatraz and/or the Golden Gate bridge. On the other hand people sort of know that San Francisco is populated with rows of apartments with bay windows on impossibly steep hills, but they don’t get the big picture here. San Francisco is at its core a sprawling city filled with such apartments and there isn’t just one hill but several. That’s what I tried to capture here, a sunset over what I believe is Russian Hill, looking down from one hill up to another.

Russian Hill Sunset

After the Grass Harvest

This bucolic hillside in Corvallis, OR is a special sight. In the rolling heartland of the state, the grass seed harvest happens for only a couple of weeks out of the whole year. I’ve previously posted other shots from the broad hills and valleys of this area, but I particularly like the interplay between the orange of the sky and the pink of the clouds as sunset creeps in.

After the Grass Harvest

An Atavistic Collection

This weekend, I finally conquered a serious challenge: organizing my ancient photo collection. As I went through it, I found some photographs from almost a decade ago. Unfortunately, they weren’t taken with a DSLR, but I’m presenting them here as a taste of compositions, colors, and places that aren’t otherwise found on Decaseconds that frequently. With no further ado:

This is the creek, behind my childhood home, where I spent countless hours building castles, bridges, and walls from sticks and stones. The water comes from the top of nearby Mt. Riga, and is icy cold through most of the year. Somehow, we still managed to handle swimming in it during the summer.

Salisbury Creek

This picture shows the Long Walk of Trinity College in Hartford, CT. This is the oldest part of the school, built when the campus moved to its current location in 1863. This particular day at the end of November was the first snow of the year. Everyone is just a bit surprised, the leaves are still on the trees, and the snow seems wetter than at any other time.

First Snow

This photograph was taken at the top of Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire. Though the top of the mountain is barren but for a few shrubs, it turns out that this isn’t because of being above the tree line. Over the course of centuries, the mountain was repeatedly burned, both to make room for livestock and because wolves were living in its caves. Now, just a handful of berry bushes and grasses crust the smooth, ancient stone of the mountain. Some have called it, “the Most Hiked Mountain in America.”

Monadnock

Finally, I have a picture from Key West, Florida. The sunsets and the enormous thunderheads there make for some lovely pictures, but my favorite detail is at the horizon: the poles supporting power lines, alone in the water, bringing electricity from key to key.

Sun Between the Keys

Artificial Photosynthesis

I’ve shown you the inside of the Energy Biosciences Building before, but I’m particularly happy with the way this shot captures the grandeur of all of this wood, steel, concrete, and glass. The sun casts the best shadows and refractory patterns through it all. (Well, maybe not THROUGH the concrete–but on it, anyway.)

Artificial Photosynthesis