Haybale "pills"

I always love the way that rolled up hay-bales look like little pills or beads, scattered across the landscape.

Silver Comet Trail, Atlanta

In the Western suburbs of Atlanta, you can find the "Silver Comet Trail," a lovely rail-to-trail conversion dozens of miles long, passing through lush and shady woods.

Highway streetlight chain, Atlanta

I just liked the curve of these streetlights in the center of a highway on the West side of Atlanta, here shifted to greyscale to better pull out their form.

Fluffy pink blossoms, Atlanta

This tree covered with fluffy pink blossoms is apparently known as a "pink silk tree." I had never seen them before, but I came across them all over the place in Atlanta.

Tarnished spirit, Atlanta

This gigantic torch statue is one of the remnants of the 1996 Olympic Games that were hosted in Atlanta, Georgia.  Once it may have been great, but now it sits dull and apparently abandoned, ignored and tarnishing by the side of the highway.

Old bunker - fortifications in Boston Harbor

All around the New England coast you find generations of different abandoned fortifications, with different styles from different centuries and different wars.  This small bunker, decaying in the midst of Boston Harbor, I suspect is likely to date from World War I or World War II and to have been used for spotting invading German submarines.

Boston Harbor shining in the sunset

Sometimes, the light is just perfect for a moment and transforms everything into a new and strange fantastic landscape that you have never seen before.  This night, the setting sun lit up all the waterways of Boston into a golden glow, highlighting the texture of its surface and contrasting starkly with the silhouettes of buildings and watercraft.

Wind on soy, Iowa

All the patterns on this field are wind, ruffling up the soy plants and exposing the lighter colored undersides of their leaves.

IATL by Gehry, Iowa City

Much of my graduate studies were done in a mess of a building designed by Frank Gehry---so much a mess that MIT actually ended up suing him over it.  The Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratory always struck me as having Gehry-esque style, but only recently did I learn that it is not just a knock-off, but the real thing.  Shouldn't have surprised me, I suppose, given how difficult it is to find any stairs in the building: the only good route between floors in one whole wing of the building is a single, incredibly slow freight elevator.

Steel beams on construction site, Iowa City

These steel beams have a more uniform and finished look to them, and so I think they may be intended to form part of the final structure of the building, rather than being temporary materials used only for the process of construction.  What exactly their purpose is, however, I am unsure.

Steel beams on construction site, Iowa City

Another stack of temporary construction materials.  I'm not certain, but I think these thin steel beams may be part of the forms used for pouring concrete.

Construction jacks, Iowa City

These extensible jacks are used to hold up the ceilings of a concrete-and-rebar building during its construction.  When stacked together, they also form interesting patterns of shape and color.

Hunter Herky, Iowa City

In a local sporting goods store, you may feel a disquieting, creepy stare on the back of your neck. You whirl around and at first you think there is nothing there, but as you look closer, you realize that the horrifying visage of Herky the Hawk is watching you from camouflaged concealment. Slowly, you back away, trying to keep it in sight while avoiding meeting its eyes, and somehow it seems to follow you all the way to to the door.

Goosebumps burnt the intern, Iowa City

I know, I know it's really just three separate movie titles, but when I read the names on this marquee at one of the few remaining video rental stores, they come together for me as a sentence with just such intriguingly strange possibilities to speculate on.

Hancher Auditorium in fog, Iowa City

One more shot from the foggy days of melting snow: the new Hancher Auditorium, leaning its angular modernist form out of the fog like the prow of some fantastic starship.

Eagle in fog, Iowa City

Around here, the bald eagles come out in droves in spring as well, presumably taking advantage of some early movement of fish in the rivers.  Here is one caught winging by just overhead, obscured by the fog from the melting snows.

Foggy cranes, Iowa City

The cranes of a university construction site are transformed by fog as well, from mere familiar pieces of equipment to fully three-dimensional objects whose scale is emphasized by the difference in visibility from one part of the crane to another.

Foggy bridge over the Iowa River

As the snow melted this spring, we had a few days of remarkable cool fog, turning the otherwise bland familiarity of the landscape into a mystical fantasy landscape.

Ice-embedded leaves, Iowa City

I love it when leaves and other organic material shapes the ice that it becomes embedded in.  I'm not quite sure of the mechanism, but I imagine that it has to do with the leaves absorbing sunlight that is reflected off of non-covered sections of the light, thus warming just enough to eventually melt these oh-so-precise embossings of themselves into the ice.

Snow-track swirl, Iowa City

I have a difficult time imagining what activity, whether human feet or vehicles, created these swirls in the melting snow on a university lawn near the river.

Snow-dimple light, Iowa City

This is just one of those little cheap solar-powered lights that you see stuck by people's driveways and front walks, but some trick of wind and sun has shaped the snow into a little dimple cup around it, over which its rays shine out.

Snow-blower at night, Iowa City

As the early winter dusk settled over this snowblower near our home, its lights highlighted the shapes of the plumes it kicked up.

Trucking away the snow, Iowa City

I know that it is practical and often necessary, but it still bemuses me to see great big dump-trucks being loaded up with snow to remove from a city, as this one was being last winter.  The snow is just such a transient material to carry, only even briefly solid, compared to all the much more heavy and substantive pieces of rock and such that are their more typical loads.

Calling the children from hiding, Iowa Children's Museum

At the children's museum a little while ago, we encountered a tooth-brushing tooth fairy who seemed to me both awesome and potentially quite frightening.  Here we see her crouched down to call a child toward an unexpected encounter with oral hygiene.

Taft Middle School, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

I truly want to know whether the design of this school was intentional on not.  Did the architect, thinking of the wild pubescent emotions and personal struggles that would be loosed within this Middle School, intentionally make a form that brings such things to mind, was it subconscious, or is it only me who thinks this way when I see it from above?

Highway Junction, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Another highway sigil scrawled upon the ground, this one just outside of Cedar Rapids.

Two-layer airborne sunrise near Chicago

As the sun rose over one layer of clouds, it disappeared up into its base, the more particle-laden are of the lower level tinted rich orange even as the clearer air above began to show the lighter tones of day.

DCA airport ceiling, Washington

I love the ceilings in National Airport in Washington, DC: their geometry and arches make me think of cathedral ceilings, and when evening comes they glow brilliantly in the setting sun.

Arlington, VA apartments

Apartment buildings in the Washington DC area.

Arlington, VA apartments

Apartment buildings in the Washington DC area.