HDR Photography
Some subzero mornings make rising from the bed nonetheless worthwhile. Billowing clouds of water vapor converting quickly to ice crystals produced this entrancing pattern, in which the plumes shifted from being lighter than the sky to darker, depending on position and density.
I’ve long been drawn to images where I could capture nature and dense urban settings in close proximity. Perhaps it’s the utopian feel of those images—if a lot of people want to live in harmony with nature, we need to pack ourselves into dense structures to do so. Does that make this just a little solarpunk?
Fullersburg Woods was the location where I captured some of my earliest Decaseconds posts (all the way back to December 27, 2011!); it was a delight to revisit the location after the nature preserve has been completely restored to the oak savanna ecosystem it originally exhibited.
Early morning sees quiet at the old construction site, where this home at the site of an old palm plantation (which had fallen into disrepair) is being renovated. I love the chaos amid the grid of palms.
A terrifying cloud (I swear, it makes sense) is the antagonist of “Nope,” and I saw echoes of that shape in this cloud above the San Jacinto Mountains and the Empire Polo Club.
This connecting courtyard between two Travelers buildings in Hartford has been blocked from foot traffic (I was shooting through a high fence), making it a strange forbidden liminal space. That the two buildings facing each other aren’t actually symmetrical—despite echoing one another—makes it feel like a sort of forbidden zone where reality has faulted somehow.
Photographing progress in the research lab can be so useful for answering that future question: “Did it really look like this last time we ran this experiment?” Our memories are imperfect, but so too is an image of a sample if one adjusts the processing settings to amplify saturation or contrast beyond reality. Sometimes, the goal of capturing something true to life overlaps with capturing something aesthetically pleasing, and then I have to share this image of freshly synthesized nanopowder clinging via static electricity to the end of a glass stirring rod.
Snow and scaffolding are each the kind of dramatic additions to a neo-gothic building that suggest the dramatic climax of a noir film will take place on its rooftop.
Passing Trinity College’s chapel on a crisp winter afternoon, I saw the nearby flag casting a dramatic shadow onto the stark white surface of the building and it was too perfect a shot to ignore.
While we’re contemplating the architecture of Clement Chemistry Building, I don’t think I’ve previously considered the way in which the dark sculptural stone sections connect together the windows on the second and third floors to make these big, tall, dramatic, dark pillars up each side of the building—almost reminiscence of the tall stained-glass windows of a cathedral.
White covers Trinity’s campus and accents the Neo-Gothic architecture, but the modernist skyline of Hartford in the distance perpetually suggests what else might architecturally be. Though I love twentieth century architecture, there’s little argument that it would have been the wrong choice for a small liberal arts college. It wasn’t until recently that I came to realize that many of these old-looking buildings are less than 100 years old; in essence, they were built to be old-fashioned from the start. Most east-coast schools are a sort of academic Disneyland—one constructed long enough ago that we forgot about the artifice and now see only authenticity.
The secretive and elite (and currently-on-probation) St. Anthony’s Hall looks dignified and quiet beneath a layer of snow.
When it’s time to take the family fishing on Lake Mohonk, one rowboat will do.
There’s nothing like Clement Chemistry Building’s dark-academic library as a place to literally cloister oneself in the days leading up to a big final exam in the end boss of chemistry: Physical Chemistry.
Beautiful views from our Hartford balcony have been a consistent Decaseconds theme, and during much of the year (i.e., the colder months), those views usually come through these two big panels of glass that comprise our sliding door. Original to the building, they are thin and leaky and corroded and it’s time to move into the future… But the limits of what can fit up the elevator mean that we’ll be swapping to a three-panel set of doors to replace the two-panel set with which we began. I’m not sure I’m even necessarily disappointed, but I knew I’d be remiss if I didn’t capture the view as I’ve come to recognize it.
Decaseconds 