I'm a surfer but I'm not crazy. I wouldn't go anywhere near these waves. But I really like this video by iamkalaniprince capturing a seemingly relentless set of 25+ foot peaks rolling in at Jaws on the North Shore of Maui. These monsters come barreling across the deep water trenches of the Pacific then heave up onto the Hawaiian reef creating some of the biggest and fastest waves in the world. The slow-motion (and the glorious Canon optics) underscores, to me, the majesty of this great dance and the strange harmony we human apes find amidst the power of nature.

Photography purists might see many HDR images as gaudy & cartoonish but I really dig the way they bring out a new experience of the subject. The hyper-realism of some HDR compositions seems to almost virtualize the world blurring the lines even further between real & synthetic. It's this same boundary dissolution that I enjoy in immersive games like the Grand Theft Auto series where you can suddenly find yourself gazing at the play of light on the city walls at sunset, awed by the natural beauty and simultaneously amazed by the number crunching under the hood.

This series of 80 HDR photos of Tokyo seems especially appropriate to me as it pushes the hyper-modernity of this massive city closer to my own Manga-fied senses. (Click through each pic for larger Flickr sets...) 80 Photos of Tokyo in HDR