37°25’57.12″N 122°10’15.72″W
A corner of the Cantor art museum at Stanford. I love the architecture.

This is one of the first pictures I’ve made with a technique called HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. It is done by taking three pictures – one exposed normally, one under exposed and one over exposed. The images are then combined to get the extra dynamic range.

37°34’47.46″N 122°20’42.32″W
This came out way different that I had originally planned, and I love it. The original photo recedes into darkness with each arch, and I was planning to go for a mysterious look to the piece. As I played around in Lightroom I found a much more interesting painterly look when I brought the shadowed areas way up into the light.

The geometry describes the space, but the colors don’t. The farthest wall is perpendicular to the other walls, which is only given away by the orientation of the window.

34° 1’53.16″N 118°13’36.24″W
Flying into LA for a meeting. A bit different from the air quality in LA when I was growing up.

38°24’38.86″N 122°43’1.96″W
…this is what I’d look like.
Sweet.

37°47’5.25″N 122°24’23.97″W
Taken, surprisingly, during rush hour at the Powell Street BART station.

37°26’32.52″N 122°10’20.57″W
Part of a window display at Stanford Shopping Center. The heads of the “pins” are about 4 inches in diameter.

I’m taking more notice of my own neighborhood now. I had never noticed this sign a few doors down until I was walking my dog today. I want an attack squirrel, too!

37°52’19.40″N 122°15’28.05″W
Taken from atop the Campanile at UC Berkeley (it’s a week of university towers!). I used the tilt-shift technique again, but this time to just focus the eye on the frisbee catcher – a small figure on a large field of green.

37°25’39.29″N 122°10’0.76″W
On the 23rd I tried to make a 2″ Yoda appear bigger. Today I went the other way – making something big look small. This is a photo of the Stanford Quad taken from Hoover Tower this afternoon. By adding some extreme depth of field in Photoshop and amping up the colors to make them look artificial, it takes on the impression of a model. It’s worth clicking on to see a bigger image. The technique is usually called “tilt-shift” and you can find plenty of other examples on flickr.

42°20’55.17″N 71° 5’1.68″W
Near the Prudential Center in Boston is this wonderful spiral fire escape. The owners decided to feature it with bright red paint in contrast to the muted tones of the rest of the building.