Reviewing my street photography from last November’s trip to Dublin, I was interested to find this set of three otherwise-unrelated images in which the sense of perspective above a busy crowd induced an element of symmetry and order.
Tag: Winter
Desert Until the Valley Floor
Mountains and hillsides in Coachella Valley are a rocky, scrubby desert so long as they stay sufficiently sloped; the moment they reach the flat ex-lake valley floor, the housing developments begin.
Tiny Figures and Big Rocks
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.
California Road at Dusk
Goats and Power Lines
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.
Civilization Gradient: Denver
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.
Lake and Subdivision
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.
Colorado Crossroads
Just as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I likewise suspect that any sufficiently populated crossroads is indistinguishable from a town.
Suburbs Outside Denver
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.
Suburbs Outside Denver I
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.
Shield Wall
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!
Home in the High Desert
Look at that little home, perched atop a cliff above the high-altitude desert north of Coachella Valley.
Desert Observatory
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.
Island of Wind Turbines
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.
Chapel-Appropriate Sky
A big, dramatic sky after a fresh snow matches the mood of St. Lawrence’s chapel.
Decaseconds 