HDR Photography
New construction on Trinity’s campus provides me with the perfect opportunity to capture the array of settings I love to see overlapping: chill picnic tables in the foreground, brightly lit homes and dorms in the middle ground with colorful lights in their windows, and the Hartford skyline in the distance.
Foliage peaked in Connecticut to an astonishing degree this year, and the red brick of Trinity College’s newer buildings made a good companion. The rolling hills that border central Connecticut’s river valley place even more on display.
Summit Street along the edge of Trinity College lives up to its name when viewed from above, with a cliff of trees next to it.
Hartford really has a lot of big trees and I love the way they’re lit up as night falls.
Impossible views are my drone’s bread and butter, and this shot above the rooftop of Seabury Hall definitely qualifies.
Long exposures in the blue hour transform students walking along the Long Walk to ghosts.
Ivory towers and expanses of brick encrusted with ivy are both college campus icons for good reason.
Ancient and modern are piled on top of one another in Mallorca.
While my drone pictures of construction on campus perhaps focused most on the steam pipe work near Clement Chemistry Building, the north side of campus has its own new project: the new home of the Elting Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
When I wonder if I’ve grown as a photographer, I look at how I tackle processing a picture like this landscape from Stone Valley.
And here is how I processed the picture originally, 10 years ago:
The shift to a more naturalistic style—and once that better respects color temperature and saturation—feels like a positive one to me.
There’s a moment when the light of the Long Walk matches the brightness of the blue hour light remaining in the sky. When that moment happens to coincide with an unusually warm October night, the connection to memory locks in.
The person sitting on the bench at the foot of Trinity’s chapel helped me out by providing an immediate sense of the building’s scale.
Drying chromatrography fractions in the Trinity College Organic Chemistry lab made for a colorful afternoon array.
Straight-piped V8 Corvette race cars are truly loud vehicles, and the bokeh’ed child putting his hands over his ears in the background is strong testament.
I’ll spoil the double meaning of this title: On the one hand, very literally the waterfall in Stone Valley is ending on the left side of the image and smoother water is in the river’s future. But in a photographic sense, this is an image that I couldn’t previously share because the mist from the waterfalls spotted the lens so badly that the image was hidden behind a layer of dark spots. The improved spot removal tools in present-day Adobe Camera Raw have finally allowed me to effectively get rid of those spots (and I’ve learned some other photographic tricks in the meantime), so this image is ready to face the light of day.
