HDR Photography
Some subzero mornings make rising from the bed nonetheless worthwhile. Billowing clouds of water vapor converting quickly to ice crystals produced this entrancing pattern, in which the plumes shifted from being lighter than the sky to darker, depending on position and density.
New adventures in color grading have brought me back, much as I did with images from Spring 2012, to my Fall 2012 trip to Florianopolis, Brazil. Big changes in how I tackle challenging raw images have produced a drastically different outcome to my photoprocessing.
The dark rocks and chaotic waves come through in a whole different way.
So, too, does this sculpture stretched over the water—the purpose of which, if there is one, I’ve still not ascertained.
There’s a sense of texture and place that a dark ocean and bright beach convey together.
I can still remember wandering back to my room at the end of the evening, feeling like I was a visitor to an alien world.
AI-generated images have perhaps made us so inured to impossible images as to dilute the shocking impact of the truly surreal. Bombay Beach’s sculptures, planted in the shores of the Salton Sea, “floating” in the sky, truly look like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
Colton, New York’s hydroelectric dam brings together dark, deep, deceptively passive water on one side and a raging torrent on the other. It’s perhaps a useful metaphor for the experience of preparing to leave a place one has lived for a decade. Visiting sites like this is also a reminder that sometimes I avoid exploring the interesting places near me until I’m preparing to leave the area; something analogous happened near the end of my sabbatical.
The New York Times, ever the Gen Z style-watchers, have decreed 2000s-era point-and-shoot cameras and their attendant nostalgia to be the next big thing. I was inspired to go back to my own point-and-shoot-shot originals from the era, and uncovered some surprisingly good shots that I’d somehow never before considered. Just look at the tower-like cloud in this sunrise from a 2005 trip to Key West; how did I miss this shot?
Coachella Valley is a desert that was once home to a lake, so careful management of water—both where it should go, and where it shouldn’t—leads to some fascinating human-engineered structures. I like this image for the sense of depth, but also for the way that the unmodified hills rise above the human-produced forms in the fore- and mid-ground.
We were in Traverse City, Michigan, during last year’s Fourth of July celebrations. Fireworks over the Grand Traverse Bay have some added drama, but the area is so far north (and west in its time zone) that the sky still hadn’t fully darkened.
After the main show has finished, private citizens produce their own displays up and down the beach.
Bombay Beach has all manner of contextless structures; why shouldn’t that include a disembodied front porch?
Dream-logic usually stays confined to dreams, but this swing in the Salton Sea appears fully isolated and separated from reality (while still existing within it); I’m reminded of an extremely low-rent version of Itsukushima Shrine.
Night falls and the well-watered communities give way to desert landscapes on the outskirts of Coachella Valley.
The sight of a boat house on a remote body of water gets my eyeballs ready for an explosive speedboat entrance from a secret agent. I guess an Adirondack sunset is an acceptable runner-up prize.
Reflections from the surface of Lake Michigan place fireworks on the same scale with the 80-year-old tug boat William C. Selvick. I particularly like the way the small buoy/float in the foreground is placed within the fireworks’ reflection.
Part of me wants to imagine that watching fireworks from the stern of a WWII-era tug would be a perfect summer experience… But another part wonders about the chipping paint and rust, hard corners and suspects that there might be some subtleties to perfecting the viewing location.
To borrow an Internet cliché, “Name a more iconic summer combination.”
Roots draped elegantly over rocks beside a burbling brook create the more-naturally-occurring equivalent of a Japanese garden.
Decaseconds 