Main Street Lights in Canton, New York

Route 11, the main road connecting the whole North Country (we don’t have any Interstates), runs through a series of quaint downtowns, where it temporarily becomes Main St. The impressive stability of the DJI Mini 3 Pro meant that I could capture long, smooth light trails from headlights and taillights representing the evening’s traffic.

Main Street Lights in Canton, New York

Lights of the Ready Campus

I’ll be teaching my first class of the Fall 2022 semester tomorrow morning, so today seemed like the perfect day to reflect on the campus to which I’m returning. The structures amidst the trees sure look good from 100 meters up.

Lights of the Ready Campus

This image also brings up an interesting note on aspect ratios: Since the start of Decaseconds, I’ve largely been formatting my very favorite images in a 1.6:1 (i.e., 16:10) aspect ratio, such that they’d function well as desktops for my various MacBook Pro laptops. The advent of the “notch” and associated added screen real estate means that new MBPs have a 1.547:1 ratio—and thus my favorite images (like this one) are arriving with a new aspect ratio.

Moments Before Sunset Over Glencrest

This incredible summer sunset view over Glencrest Farm in Kentucky came at the perfect time to test out my new lens: a 70-200 f/2.8 (the “classic” sports photography lens) for my Sony a7R IV. Though I had such a lens for my Nikons years ago, updating all of my glass for the new camera has, of course, been a process.

Moments Before Sunset Over Glencrest

Rogue AI Sunset

I’ve been excited about the possibilities of advanced algorithms in processing pictures, both to increase resolution and reduce noise. When used in combination on an initially noisy image, however, the results can be… unpredictable. Though this image looks fairly reasonable on the web page, clicking through to the full-resolution version on Flickr shows some exciting rogue AI strangeness—like odd places of varying noise reduction.

Rogue AI Sunset

Fishing on Lake Cahuilla

At one level, this is a calming, nostalgic image: two people fishing from a causeway over Lake Cahuilla reservoir in Coachella Valley.

The layers of reflections and horizontal lines, however, give it a very surreal, Dali-esque topology: reality doesn’t quite seem to be shaped correctly here. Space is folded in on itself.

Fishing on Lake Cahuilla