White Hollow Farms have become, over the past few years, the site of the Saratoga Horse Shows. At the edge of the property, turnouts are a little array of springtime growth.
Dressage
At Land Rover Kentucky Three-Day Eventing, the dressage portion of the competition takes place in this tightly constrained box that, rendered against the footing of Rolex Stadium, looks like some surrealist dreamscape.
Heritage Trail
A trail, complete with cool stairs and abandoned ruins, on an island in the middle of town is something my childhood self would have been absolutely over the moon with. From a drone’s eye view, I think that sense of magic is effectively captured.
Eventing Course
Kentucky Horse Park is an almost unreal expanse of stables, rings, and fields. During Three-Day Eventing, those fields are converted to a cross-country course.
Rapids on the Grasse River in Spring
This image is my submission to the Spring Photo Contest being run by Grasse River Heritage; the river and its associated park are its subject. I delight in being asked to work under requirements—in this case, both a subject and a time of year—because I feel it focuses me. I get to achieve something specific, which adds some delightful pressure to flying my quadcopter around the island.
Mogul 2021
The look of a mogul at the show—Publisher of The Plaid Horse, Dr. Piper Klemm—has changed a bit in 2021. The Bane-esque jacket for an unusually cold day at Land Rover Kentucky Three-Day Eventing was combined with a Clarkson University mask (perfect for promoting her summer courses.)
Press Room
I’ve heard that the Land Rover (previously Rolex) Kentucky Three-Day Eventing competition is the sport’s largest and most prestigious. In spite of that, no spectators were allows this year; the glowing press box looked pretty lonely in a darkened, empty indoor.
South Campus Super Resolution
The “let’s enhance” action continues with this image of Berkeley’s College of Chemistry, Strawberry Canyon, and South Campus from the top of the Campanile. It holds a special place in my heart because it shows the entire terrain I traversed going to and from work during my first year in grad school.
Berkeley Lab Super Resolution
Extracting additional information from an image by “enhancing” it has long been a ridiculous trope of police procedurals; it’s with great amusement that I noticed that Photoshop’s new “Super Resolution” capability (which uses machine learning to quadruple the resolution of an image) is under an option called “Enhance”. The first subject for enhancement was this picture I took of Berkeley and San Francisco in 2011. It’s worth the click-through for the full resolution version.
(Adding to the super-resolution theme, this image also contains, in the lower-center, the Molecular Foundry and its associated center for electron microscopy.)
That Campus Glow
St. Lawrence’s campus emits white light at night, while Park Street uses orange sodium lamps.
Filters on a Shelf
A well-stocked and well-arranged chemistry lab tends to accumulate localized collections of one specific part that wind up looking like a page from a scientific supplies catalog.
Larry’s View
The most senior faculty member in St. Lawrence University’s Department of Chemistry is preparing to retire and I selected this image to present to him. (Shhh, keep it a secret for a few more days.) He often looks out from Johnson Hall of Science, the building in the foreground, north towards the older parts of campus (like the chapel spire above the horizon.) In this image, I hopefully captured for him both where he stands and what he sees so that he can take them with him when he goes.
The Cell
Over the course of the past two years, I’ve used OpenSCAD to design a gas/vacuum cell that can support a pressed silica nanoparticle pellet in front of a variety of spectroscopy systems. The core of the cell was 3D printed in aluminum by Shapeways, with some subsequent facing on our lathe to get good seals with the O-rings. This first version is designed to fit into our fluorimeter.
After using the first cell for a year, I realized I also wanted to be able to attach it to a fiber-optic-based spectrometer. Here, you can see the second cell attached to our Schlenk line.
Chapel-Appropriate Sky
A big, dramatic sky after a fresh snow matches the mood of St. Lawrence’s chapel.
April Fool’s Snow
April Fool’s Day played a prank on the reemerging plants of the North Country, dropping ice and snow onto green grass and growing buds.
