Tag: Sunset

The Future Wasn’t Already There, But Now It’s Evenly Distributed

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My favorite William Gibson quote is, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” How we gauge futurity—or how we identify the traits we associate with future-ness—means that some places will have more “future” to them than others. A mountaintop in the Adirondacks might be pretty similar to its condition 100 years ago, while downtown Berkeley would be unrecognizable.

This image is a picture of the past, from the “future”: I wanted to print a tall, vertical image of Berkeley and the Bay but had (it turns out) never quite taken the one I wanted. I had taken the two pictures that went into making this image as part of a larger panorama in 2013 that never quite came out. Here in the present, I pulled in every technique in my arsenal—Adobe’s super resolution, Topaz AI noise reduction, frequency separation—to assemble two images from a circa-2010 16 MP Nikon D7000 into the 76 MP monster you see below. This one is definitely worth clicking through to full resolution.

The Future Wasn't Already There, But Now It's Evenly Distributed

Shores of Lake Cahuilla

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Apparently the original Lake Cahuilla was a prehistoric lake in the Coachella Valley; its modern recreation is a reservoir in the hills outside town. The relationship between humans and nature in the region is well-encapsulated by that point of comparison.

Shores of Lake Cahuilla

California Wind Turbine

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An iconic image of renewable energy in California, if I do say so myself: scrub brush in the foreground, mountains in the background, and a huge wind turbine in the center of it all. I particularly like the way this particular shutter speed allowed for just a slight blur at the tips of the turbine blades.

California Wind Turbine

Wind in the North of Coachella Valley

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At the northern end of Coachella Valley, civilization peters out and the wind kicks up. The seemingly endless fields of wind turbines are (unsurprisingly) well-positioned: hopping out of the car to get this shot, I was nearly knocked over by a grit-enhanced gust, the likes of which I’m not sure I’ve ever felt before.

Wind in the North of Coachella Valley

Sunset Beyond Long Lake

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Good landscape photography is all about finding the perfect vantage point and being patient. Sometimes, however, real life demands a bit more serendipity. While there are incredible views to be had in the Adirondacks, there are also long sections locked between walls of forest. When there’s a once-in-a-summer sky overhead, patience gives way to reaching a lake before the moment disappears.

Sunset Beyond Long Lake

Stone to City

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While my normal images capturing the “civilization gradient” tend to be more focused on space (traversing from nature to dense urban areas), I sort of like the way this image reminds me of a traversal through time, from the Stone Age to the Information Age. As William Gibson says, “The future has already arrived—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Or perhaps it really just reminds me of the vantage point from Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog“.

Stone to City