HDR Photography
Winter finally arrived (properly) to Hartford, Connecticut, and with it, Bushnell Park was transformed into perhaps its most charming version of itself. The tiny silhouettes of people among the glowing lamp posts and decorated trees brings to mind an urban Narnia.
Drone panoramas have really opened up the kinds of images I can capture with a light, fixed-focal-length-lens drone like the DJI Mini 3 Pro.
These panoramas from Coachella Valley, covering the Trilogy subdivision and its adjacent golf course, capture a dramatic expanse of sky and wet, reflective surfaces following a rare rainstorm.
Perhaps the best mark of a place I love is one that keeps its charm throughout the whole year. I only really enjoyed the North Country during the blaze of autumn foliage and I only really enjoy Coachella Valley during the mild temperatures and wet(ter) weather of winter. By comparison, Trinity College is beautiful at every moment of the year. A multilayer of serious snow arrived this weekend and finally brought Trinity into Winter Mode, confirming that this place is basically always fantastical.
Definitely click through to Flickr for the full-resolution detail on this panorama covering the approach of the Palms to Pines Scenic Byway into Palm Springs.
Like a full-time Burning Man, Bombay Beach shifted from its origins as a sort of “California Riviera” in the 1950s to something with more the feel of an artists’ colony. The town’s little grid of streets amid the emptiness of the desert valley brings to mind open-world video game maps, but the eclectic nature of the beach itself makes reality (as usual) far more interesting.
Some kind of teleportation accident seems as likely an explanation as any other for how a swing set wound up in the middle of a lake.
A big panorama of Empire Polo Club helps one to understand a bit how this site can hold both Coachella and Stagecoach.
Winter days in the desert are short enough already, but the tall San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains cut the light off even sooner. High up with a drone, there are still some final rays to be harvested.
Rather than a fortress in a forest, this is a fortress composed of forest—or at least, it feels that way. While the far-off mountains and the lights of Palm Springs may be visible from the air, the ground-level setting is far more constrained and cozy.
P.S. Can you spot your humble photographer in this shot?
Though a photographer might briefly visit many locations, actually staying in a location means being present at the moment when the light is just right. In this case, sunrise pouring into Coachella Valley lights up the mountainsides and the rooftops, but not yet the valley floor itself.
Being there to capture the sunrise picture is great, of course, but being on location in this case also meant being able to follow it up with a sunrise dip in the hot tub.
The dry seabed that is Coachella Valley provides a very flat surface for construction; as a result, modern constructions mostly fall on whatever pattern/array is convenient to the developers. In a few places, however, interruptions in those arrays stand out in an aerial view.
The palms on this golf course, for example, are on a clear grid, with the fairways and greens cut into it. Was this a palm plantation before the course was build?
Here, the green lawn of a larger home stands out, covering multiple grid positions, while neighboring homes cluster into smaller, more regularly arrayed lots.
Though this subdivision isn’t itself on a grid, the clubhouse nonetheless interrupts the pattern.
A big, broad, western-America sunrise may feel summer-y, but this one was taken in the depths of winter.
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.
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.
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.
Decaseconds 