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Oscilloscope
My lab is packed with control boxes and oscilloscopes and all manner of signal processing equipment; strung between them all, like the web of a spider on caffeine, is a truly epic array of cables and...
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Big Kid Legos
I am a spectroscopist, and this is my laser. It’s enormous, it’s fiendishly complicated, and it takes an enormous amount of time to keep it cooperative. Nonetheless, I can learn about the basic motions...
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Clinical
The labs of the Energy Biosciences Building (which, incidentally, looks quite pretty from the outside, as well) are brand new. Just weeks after the lab opened, the desks are already cluttered with...
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Cold Containment
Hyperbright hallways in the Energy Biosciences Building come straight from the set of a sci-fi movie. Between labs and storage space are cold room facilities like the one in the foreground of this...
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Advanced Lab
Johnson Hall of Science is an unusually green building—particularly for one filled with hoods and hazardous chemicals. It also happens to have a truly surreal geometry that messes with your head a bit,...
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Four Images of Fermilab Prairie
For 28 years, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois was the site of the now-dormant Tevatron particle accelerator. For three summers during high school and college, I worked in...
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Sunset. Stat
The key to getting the most incredible image of a view is to take “luck”/chance out of the equation. I’ve been watching this same view (from the balcony of my research facility at Lawrence Berkeley...
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East Bay Skyflare
Up in the hills, Berkeley Lab possesses some different environmental features from the East Bay below. As sunsets like this finish the day, frogs begin to croak in the hills and the whole lab...
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Dinner Time in Strawberry Canyon
The work day is ending and the eight-to-six employees are returning home. They meet in bars or at rec leagues or around the table or in front of the TV, but the hour is still too early to head out for...
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Rather Be Sailing
Morning sun provides very stark, even lighting across the San Francisco Bay. I know rationally that gravity forces the big body of water to be (basically) flat, but the curves of the shore and the...
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Molecular Foundry
The Molecular Foundry’s enormous overhang looks alien up close, but the scale of the structure is really apparent with the lighting beneath the gravity-challenging bulk. Filed under: Berkeley,...
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Industrial “Alpine Lodge”
This physical plant building at Berkeley Lab has the broad A-frame structure and charming attic windows of an alpine lodge. It also has an evergreen-encrusted window to Berkeley and the Port of...
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Dark Island
Much of the Bay Area, packed densely with people, perforates with light-emitting devices after sunset. When a volume avoids that, there’s a story and an active effort by conservationists behind it. At...
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Bokeh City
That skyline is recognizable, even shrouded behind 200 mm f/2.8 bokeh. Though many people in the Berkeley Hills watched this scene, and though I wasn’t the only one with a camera, the unique...
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Golden Light on Oakland
On the trails of Berkeley’s Hall of Science, Bay Area residents watch the last light of the day on the Advanced Light Source and downtown Oakland. The area has multiple layers in physical and...
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Golden in Memory
Back in New York, my memories of sabbatical in California have already taken on the golden nostalgia hues of the past. If not for the photographic evidence to the contrary, I might wonder if I’d...
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A Midsummer Night’s City
In the Berkeley Hills, above the National Lab’s Advanced Light Source, the view over Oakland’s twinkling night sprawl entrances. Look at all of those light-emitting objects! As LED lights have replaced...
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San Francisco Sun Show
California summer: Blue skies (no clouds), dry grass. California winter: Complicated skies (crazy clouds), lush grass. Looking across the verdant hills of Berkeley Lab to San Francisco, it’s not hard...
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Self-Portraits of a Sabbaticaler
I’m interested in how scientists are depicted in media. They seem to always be in one of two modes. Either smiling at the desk with a screen and board filled with data/equations: Or in the lab, with...
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Spectroscopy Lab
After spending my entire adult life as a laboratory scientist, the web of gas lines and vacuum pumps and electrical cable seems normal. I do understand, rationally, that all of this looks overwhelming....
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