Tales from the Beach

Time to catch up with the backlog of images I took at end of summer in Stanley Park, a location where I saw a good opportunity to further pursue my ongoing landscape project. The park itself is home of centuries old trees and shores the waters of the pacific ocean, so I couldn’t help recognizing the spot above as the perfect synergy between these two bordering elements. 
In the interior of the park, one can find many bodies of water too, the smallest of them being Beaver Lake. It homes many species of fish and water birds, but its surface has decrease constantly during the last years — causes are speculated to be global warming and other climate changes — threatening the lake’s extensive wildlife, while discussions are being held to decide whether the aquatic ecosystem should be preserved or to allow the forest to take over.

Although it might not look like it at first sight, the image above is in fact an hdr. It is somehow surprising how little attention is given to black and white HDR in most textbooks or even the internet in general, since the amount of details and texture which can be revealed from a careful tonemapping would make HDR almost a natural preamble to any black and white based workflow. 

In this particular example, the image above started as a set of nine brackets which where then tonemapped to draw the necessary details out of the sand, small rocks, and texture of the tree. It was at the end converted and toned in black and white. Here, the objective was to spread the tonal range over as many Zones as possible, ranging from almost pure black to almost pure white. This extended contrast creates, in my view, the most compelling black and white results.

Inside Out

The textbook example of HDR photography will always be the dimly lit interior room and a window to a bright sunny day outside. In this shot i guess that I decided to do things backwards, and found this high rise building, where the hollow foyer's illumination was clearly overpowering the faint evening lights of the street outside. Like in the standard example, the HDR algorithm — in this case one which I particularly like for its natural looking rendition — worked its wonders and created a nice evenly illuminated frame as expected.

The Ziggurat

Memories of a great evening when I once had the honour to be sitting side by side of Sir Norman Foster in the front row of a cinema for the premiere of his documentary movie “How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?” came to my mind as I stood in front of this building, which, judging by its shinny image of polished glass and steal, could have been one of Foster’s designs.

Foster was once faced with the seemingly innocuous but inceptive question in this movies’ title by American architect Buckminster Fuller, when they were both discussing the Sainsbury Centre in UAE. The answer to the question set Foster in a journey which would define and create the style for which he his known today, an icon of modern architecture.

My mind raced backwards as it traced how the concept of mass in architecture has morphed through times, ranging from the weightlessness of Calatrava’s anthropomorphic modern structures to the massive egyptian pyramids, as I paradoxically stood at the base of this Ziggurat of the present times, trying to catch a glimpse of the shrine under the clouds.

Loft Living

Here’s an image that I had the chance of taking recently during one of my trips. I’ve always had a certain proclivity for architectural and landscape work, so why not joining both subjects in the same shot? 

Without delving too deep into the theory behind the decisions leading to this particular composition, one can say that from the technical side, the relatively low illuminated loft and a bright, brooding overcast sky outside were again conditions de rigueur for a proper use of hdr. Shot with a post-geometry corrected canon 14mm lens and +-3ev brackets.

The Jewel Stairs

Followers of my photography are certainly aware of my druthers for modern staircases. These time I’m presenting here a somehow grittier exemplar of stair architecture. This one was a complex subject that I had the chance of photographing not so long time ago. It was challenging to capture all the light dynamics even, with a span of −4 to +4 HDR brackets. Another aspect that I wanted to preserve was the spatial dynamics embodied by the play of light and shadows entering the scene from the corners of the lower third and the diagonal metal elements like the stair’s steps and pipes. After carefully setting up, the shot was taken with three shifts of a slightly tilted 24mm lens. This stairs will certainly make a welcome contribution to my industrial photo project

These stairs also remind me of Li Po’s poem entitled “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” 

The jeweled steps are already quite
white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my
gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the
clear autumn.

Translation by Ezra Pound

The Next Chapter

Me and my good friend Jacque Gudé had the chance to access an old paper mill where we were presented with a profusion of vintage  machinery and other industrial paraphernalia.

I did a first run of the original brackets through my workflow, but the end result didn’t come out with the quality that I was expecting, something during the tone mapping process just didn’t quite workout well, and many details were lost.
The image that you can see here is therefore the result of my second attempt at this set of brackets. It is a slightly tilted HDR vertorama (a technique that I grew quite fond of lately), cropped to a 4x5 frame format and emphasizing the felt transport system of the dryer section of an older Fourdrinier-style paper-making machine. 
Many of these machines and production facilities have been decommissioned during the years, and the trend is likely to continue: 2011 was the first time in history when e-books sales surpassed printed books for the first time, an indication that paper-based media is slowly fading out to give place to new technologies.

Artificial Consciousness

Moore's Law, first predicted in the 1970’s, establishes the long-term exponential growth of technology over time. It states that the performance of a computer’s central processing unit consistently doubles every eighteen months, which implies that by the year 2030, the average mass-market computer chip will be somewhere around 1024 times more powerful than the average computer chip in 2010. It also means that a single computer chip will be able to do more computations per second than the human brain itself, reaching a limit where machine consciousness could become plausible.


As of 2011, no artificial conscious entity is known, the most similar entity to it would be arguably IBM’s Watson project. The dream seems to be very far away from us, and some proponents doubt whether it will ever be achieved, arguing that there must be something more to consciousness apart form pure computational power.  
Whether the creation of such artificial consciousness would bring more advantages than hazards to society, is nowadays a matter of philosophical discussion, and only time can tell whether these predictions will become true at all.

“The Singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on; thus the machines, acting in concert with those humans who have evolved into postbiological cyborgs, achieve effective world domination. The machines enter into a “runaway reaction” of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of A.I.s appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted.”

— Raymond Kurzweil