HDR Photography
Big changes are coming to the world of Decaseconds: Next fall, I’ll be returning to Trinity College (my alma mater) as their newest physical chemistry professor.
I took this picture of Trinity’s chapel, framed by foliage, as I packed up my car to leave at the end of my interview. Though I didn’t yet know what I do now (I’m going back there!), the warm breeze and familiar smells and satisfaction of a successful interview left me with a sense of calm, comfort, and peace.
Fall brings both fantastic foliage and dramatic sunsets to the North Country; my favorite evenings are those in which the hues of the the sky and the leaves match the red brick of St. Lawrence University’s Richardson Hall.
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.
Far beyond the glowing web of Bay Area streets, the verdant Berkeley Hills are curving and waving and tossing in the wind.
Along the trail to Laurel Falls, smooth, flat creekside campsites with well-defined fire pits make ideal rest stops.
The East Bay’s tree-lined streets make for a calming juxtaposition with “cloud city” wall of buildings and marine layer across the water.
Each pine tree in the forest stakes out its own space in the canopy, with only the tiniest channels of light between them.
Here is my Decaseconds partner in crime during our visit to Raven’s Run in Kentucky last summer. We were on a cliff high above the Kentucky River, getting our landscape photography fix.
Winter grays have locked down the North Country, but my photographs still contain the memories of a gorgeous fall. Now if only the polished, crystalline, snowy winter would arrive; I’m done with stick season.
When my graduate school co-conspirators visited the Bay Area during sabbatical, we couldn’t avoid a trip to the Muir Woods to be back among the enormous redwoods. I won’t deny that I pretended for a moment that I was on Endor.
My favorite view of the Bay Area (and the view that first let me define the idea of the civilization gradient as an element of my photography) is layered up with loads of detail. Down in Berkeley Lab is the building where I worked on sabbatical, and across the Bay Bridge is the completed Salesforce Tower hiding in the marine layer. The differences, particularly from the last time I showed a very similar shot from the spring, are in nature: the high-altitude clouds have been replaced with empty skies and that rolling marine layer, while the green hills have shifted to a dry, highly flammable tan.
As busy as the cities of the Bay Area become, there are the spaces in the fire trails (like the one in the foreground) to get some quiet and distance. There’s an odd orthogonality of the senses in being able to see all of the commotion below with none of the accompanying sound.
In an otherwise carefully symmetrized Parisian setting, I wonder how this very high-entropy chair agglomeration formed? They aren’t set in a ring for people to chat, or even in a way that allows all of them to be used. Perhaps the grounds crew clustered them to make space for their own maintenance activities?
Is there any better place to be at the end of June than the Adirondacks? A soft carpet of moss and pine needles, a smooth varnished wood bench, and a evening view of Saranac Lake makes a great combination.
The utilitarian, earthquake-resistant architecture of Berkeley Lab amid the verdant hills of the East Bay seems like a science-fictional setting—a location that can’t possible exist—in contrast to San Francisco in the distance.
Decaseconds 