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

Seaside grafitti

If you give people a maleable surface and some privacy they will almost undoubtedly deface it. This is certainly true on this soft, well-worn sea cliff on California’s coast. It was difficult to make out much of the writing but it is evident that someone sure wanted to make sure that heart would endure. Almost makes one wonder if the original artist periodically comes back to touch up and admire their handiwork or if the heart just serves as a painful reminder any more.

Seaside Graffiti

Three Tree from Shorewood

Another shot from Shorewood’s community beach, this time looking to the south at (from right to left) Three Tree Point, Seahurst park, and the waterfront houses on Standring Lane. The water was exceptionally calm on this summer evening and the gentle lapping and soft lighting were extraordinarily relaxing. At low tide you can practically walk straight across to Seahurst beach, but alas this was taken at an extremely high tide.

Three tree from Shorewood

Shorewood Beach at High Tide

As much as I like the California ocean beaches for being the epitome of ocean beaches, I think my favorite beaches are the ones around Puget Sound. They may not be particularly sandy except at low tide, and the water may be too cold to really enjoy even during the hottest part of summer but Puget Sound is always so calm and subdued. It’s a gentle lapping of waves rather than a roar of the surf.

Shorewood Beach

Americana Double Feature

I had my own staging of Two-Lane Blacktop in central Oregon this weekend, with the company of this particularly lovely 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet. This is grass seed country, and this particular weekend fell in the middle of the harvest. Long, perfectly maintained roads are intercut with forested hillsides and busy fields. By this point in the evening, however, nightfall brought calm with it.

Teutonic Americana

For every sunny hilltop like the one above, there was a tree-lined valley. The setting sun really picks out the details of every treetop, but it’s a shame that Oregon has such a clean, healthy atmosphere. Without other molecules in the air to scatter the light, the sunsets lack the exciting colors of other parts of the country. This photograph captures the feeling of blasting down the road, wind in my hair, with only an occasional truck for company.

Country Highway

Future Sunsets

Brendan has previously posted a several of gorgeous shots of Half Moon Bay and its associated Pillar Point air force base. This particular shot shows a different kind of Cold War-era neurotic nostalgia that I find really enticing. On one hand, this young couple is gazing off at the family silhouetted in the sunset–a vision of their future. On the other hand, the radar dome of the Pillar Point AFS is a sinister reminder of Cold War-era threats from across the ocean. Taken together, I’d like to think it’s emblematic of the Californian experience for a lot of folks: promise and peril.

Future Sunsets