HDR Photography
I spent the early part of this week at St. Lawrence University’s Camp Canaras (like Saranac Lake spelled backwards) for a retreat. Cold and rain tamped down expectations of canoeing; instead, I had an early morning hike in the sound-dampened world of fog.
At night, the camp took on the otherworldly quiet of the Adirondacks after dark.
It’s the first day of class for St. Lawrence today, so I’m getting ready and looking towards the future and so forth, but it’s also a great time to look back on the past. It’s been more than a year since I visited South Africa, and when it’s -15ºF on the walk to work, thinking about the Zulu Nyala game reserve can bring back some pleasant memories. It’s the details that stick with me: the fences made from whole sticks of wood, rather than boards, and that particular red color of the soil.
The wind blew warm at 45ºF, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and then a new front blew in bringing -15ºF temperatures and, eventually, a load of snow. Standing in the oddly warm breeze, sun suddenly in my eyes, felt momentous. When I looked at this image, with its huge, Yggdrasil-esque tree and Bifröst-esque rainbow and flair of atoptics, I couldn’t help but think that I had my own backyard version of Ragnarök.
(This post was extra-fun to write because of all the excellent, Nordic umlauts.)
Today is New Year’s Eve: out with the old, in with the new, etc. Time doesn’t seem to pass in Florida, however—it’s a place that’s always at the dawn of history, the muggy primordial swamp, with the monolith and the howling primates just outside the frame.
When I travel from the wintery expanse of the North Country to Florida, nothing feels real. Am I in some humid almost-heaven of trees and life and ponies? The massive sun halo doesn’t hurt the effect—that’s for sure.
Late fall doesn’t mean rich, verdant scenes or flame-colored leaves. In the North Country, late fall really means early winter. The fields are brown, the trees are bare, and the scene is dusted with snow. Other than the greens of the pines, the world hibernates. The birds scattering to the air are the only signs of life, but the scene has a sort of cliché, stark beauty.
The arrangement of tiny plants and epic trees and enormous boulders that makes up a Japanese garden is calm and beautiful, but to see the inspirations for those geometries “in the wild,” so to speak, is so much more impressive. Big falls and gnarly roots and little streams make the “real” world just as poetic.
Berkeley is a pretty surreal place; as I process that, I thought my 400th post on Decaseconds might be a great time to really show it. The yellows of the birch tree are so sharp on a foggy fall morning, amid the hard, stained concrete of the past and the high-tech Li Ka Shing Building (one of my first-ever posts) materials. Visual contrast, both literal and metaphorical, align with the conceptual contrast of a place that prides itself on being countercultural while also being the birthplace of many of the technologies and ideas that make our modern culture possible.
I may continue to bemoan the theme-park-like atmosphere of Muir Woods by midday on Saturday, but in the very early morning, with dawnlight scattering through the marine layer, it’s easy to forget about all that. There are no words to describe the place without resorting to cliché. Even so, the echoes of “Six Flags: Muir Woods” still exist, like these wood pathways designed to lessen the destruction that would be caused by enormous numbers of visitors on dirt paths.
On a chill and cloudy afternoon, the sky hangs low over Berkeley and Oakland. Highly textured red tile roofs, ionic columns, industrial air handlers, all separated from the “mundane world” by a wall of trees: are these the “layers” of the Berkeley experience?
Weaver finches are everywhere in South Africa, building their nests in any tall plant. Safety in numbers, however, pushes them to push their cellulosic hosts to their limits. Trees are completely filled with nests, the avian equivalent of an apartment complex.
Having recently finished the fantastic Bioshock Infinite, I’ve had images of early-twentieth-century American exceptionalism floating through my brain. No matter what you think of the (sometimes questionable) policy decisions based on such a policy, the iconography is undeniably seductive. Neoclassical design features and waving flags on a crisp Sunday afternoon! Though this moment on St. Lawrence’s campus might not be literally of that time, the spirit of it was overwhelming.
Winter crisps and desaturates the landscape, and draws the eye from the Northeast to places more southern, where I wonder if, “the grass is greener on the other side.” That might sometimes be an illusion, but then there are cases like this one: the grass is literally greener on the other side.
The rolling, bucolic hills of the Connecticut-New York border are one of my favorite places. The foothills of the Berkshires roll along under the late-autumn reds and browns, the clouds pucker towards rain overhead, and the decrepit skeletons of agriculture linger among the charming homes that now dominate the landscape.
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.
Decaseconds 