HDR Photography
Can you spot the tiny figures at the top of the hill? I’m confident that tiny figures produce a sense of grand scale in images—particular desert shots, like this one, where the inhuman nature of the place can make understanding the sizes of objects difficult. Nonetheless, I find myself wondering how small the figures in an image can be before the viewer loses the ability to recognize them as human.
If you zoom all the way in, there are tiny goats in the fields between the power lines. They convey a pretty mind-boggling sense of just how big those lines are.
My favorite feature to capture in landscape images is a gradient from sparsely populated areas to dense, urban ones. A connecting flight through Denver gave me the opportunity to add a mile-high gradient to my collection.
This picture was processed using the Super Resolution algorithm, so it’s definitely worth clicking through to view the high-resolution version on flickr.
For once, the arbitrary contortions of a subdivision’s streets seem to have some purpose: fitting within the shoreline of this lake outside Denver, Colorado.
Just as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I likewise suspect that any sufficiently populated crossroads is indistinguishable from a town.
Neal Stephenson’s “burbclaves” in Snow Crash are subdivisions-as-mini-nation-states—an intentionally silly idea in the satirical context of the novel’s libertarian dystopia. These Denver suburbs are now my internal vision of how such a burbclave would look.
Waaay off in the distance, beyond the un-grid of this subdivision, is downtown Denver. Beyond that are the Rocky Mountains. That sense of being sort-of-near spectacular sights while still being trapped within cul-de-sacs is one that I expect is pretty common to people who spent some amount of their childhood living within such developments.
Dune’s naturally occurring “Shield Wall” always seemed a bit fictional to me—until I saw Denver’s metropolitan area from above. Look at that sharp divide between mountains and the valley floor!
Look at that little home, perched atop a cliff above the high-altitude desert north of Coachella Valley.
This mysterious small observatory outside Landers, California (not far from the Integratron) sticks out from the landscape—both figuratively and literally. Goings-on there strike me as excellent fodder for a science fiction novel.
Amongst the Thousand Islands, scattered between New York and Ontario, this island of fields and wind turbines seems to be astride the past and the future.
A big, dramatic sky after a fresh snow matches the mood of St. Lawrence’s chapel.
April Fool’s Day played a prank on the reemerging plants of the North Country, dropping ice and snow onto green grass and growing buds.
This tiny warm spot near both a vent (for heat) and a downspout (for ample rainwater) continues to have green grass while the rest of the campus is locked beneath a blanket of snow.
Decaseconds 