Sameer ⊙ Halai

11/14/2022

This spot is less than 3 hours from San Francisco. We were at 3,000ft/914m above sea level, heading east and just a few mins after this we were surrounded by snow. Love the late evening sun filtering through the dense fog!

10/24/2022

Something about the juxtaposition of so many things stand out here. The sunset far behind creating a dramatic backdrop while the purplish path is the same color as the mountains; the cute goats, the colorful assortment of plastic containers, the geometric neatness of the planted trees contrasted by the chaotic leaves in the foreground, and even the contrast between objects in tack sharp focus and those blurred out.

10/03/2022

No filters. This is what it looked like before sunrise yesterday at Kings Canyon National Park. Love that natural gradient - blue to orange to yellow back to blue!

03/31/2021

We were at recently. The moon 🌝 was very bright and it created an opportunity for capturing something that shows a lit up subject as well as stars in the sky 🌌 . This is a single exposure. The bridge in the bottom foreground created even more depth. It was a beautiful night!

07/16/2019

The Vessel in NYC. Designed by the British designer Thomas Heatherwick, the elaborate honeycomb-like structure rises 16 stories and consists of 154 flights of stairs, 2,500 steps, and 80 landings for visitors to climb. Vessel is the main feature of the 5-acre Hudson Yards Public Square. Its final cost is expected to be $200 million.

07/12/2019

Love that most people can readily tell this is despite there being no actual landmarks visible. There is indeed no place like and it’s always fun to be back here!

07/09/2019

Chernobyl is most famous for the disaster at the nuclear power plant. But lesser known is this secret Soviet military base called Duga-3. It was shrouded in such secrecy during the height of the Cold War that on official maps, it was marked as a children’s summer camp. Like the rest of what would become the Exclusion Zone, it had to be abandoned suddenly in 1986 when the nuclear disaster struck. While it once was at the forefront of Soviet military and scientific technology, classified as top secret, today it rests, mostly forgotten and silent in the woods surrounding Chernobyl. This room pictured here was the gymnasium in the residential quarters of the base, mostly untouched for the last 33 years.

07/06/2019

A swing with a view! Those clouds below our feet were actually tightly covering the Pacific Ocean, all the way up to the horizon.

06/30/2019

McWay Falls is an 80-foot-tall (24 m) waterfall on the coast of Big Sur in central California. It is a tidefall, a waterfall that empties directly into the ocean, and one of only two in California. In 1983, a record rainfall resulted in huge landslides and mudflows, and due to reconstruction and wave activity, this sandy beach was formed beneath the falls. Over time, the beach is expected to go away. The falls are only accessible by boat, one of which we can see approaching in this pic.

06/27/2019

06/14/2019

Toruń is one of the oldest cities in Poland, with the first settlement dated back to the 8th century and later having been expanded in 1233 by the Teutonic Knights. I was walking back from work, taking a shortcut, when this interesting frame came about. Most of Toruń is actually brick red, but in this frame we see the blue / grey cobblestone at the bottom, the red exposed bricks on the sides, the yellow painted walls of the restaurant with its pink roofs and the sharply punctuating man in his red shirt.

06/08/2019

🌈 Equality Parade in Warsaw 🇵🇱

@ Warsaw, Poland