As we reach the vernal equinox at the precise moment this post goes up, I’m taking a moment to reflect on the end of a long, cold winter in Hartford with some of the images I captured of the experience.
Summit Street in Late Winter
Leaves are long gone, buds have yet to quite emerge, and the colorful display from my earlier picture down Summit Street exists only in that photograph.
Wadsworth and Travelers
The Wadsworth and Travelers Tower frame Bushnell Tower, the State Capitol, and Bushnell Park, for a lovely postcard image of Hartford, Connecticut.
Spring Almost Arrives to Campus
Looking back through years of photographs, I find that my late-winter/early-spring seasonal photos are nearly empty. The bland pre-bloom colors have a lot to do with that, so I thought I would lean into it with a B&W approach that says, “You didn’t want to see the colors, anyway.”
Golden Dome, Green Park
The elegant State Capitol of Connecticut is on a hill above downtown Hartford—the same hill once occupied by the school that would become Trinity College.
The Old Indio
Dawn light illuminates the old Indio, California—a farming city of date plantations and strange water projects. In the distance, the oncoming scourge of sprawling subdivisions may signal the end of this particular era.
Sunrise on L&G
The bright rooftops in the foreground are L&G Desert Store, a local grocery established in 1979, an ongoing representation of what Indio was during an earlier era, before it was encrusted with subdivisions.
Shadows Reveal the Banks
Though the winter oak savanna of Fullersburg Woods is a busy mess of trees, grass, and snow, the horizontal Rayleigh-scattering-blue shadows of the riverbanks add large-scale structure to the landscape.
Canada Geese from Above
Canada geese clustered around the newly restructured Salt Creek through Fullersburg Woods form an array of little dots and dot-pairs: sitting geese form single blobs, while standing geese make for a dot-pair from a goose and their shadow. It occurs to me that I might analyze the distribution between the two to understand flock dynamics if I weren’t the particular kind of scientist I am.
Hot Jumping
Way back when the Sun was inescapable, a pack crowd baked in UV radiation while watching CSI Greenwich.
Snow Off of Cook
A sudden morning snow storm followed by incongruously warm day led to an odd quick-melting layer of snow that fanned off of rooftops like the blast visible in the distance.
Night Snow Plow
During the Northeast’s last great storm, I ventured out with my camera to document Hartford’s response and the stillness of the city beneath a layer of sound-absorbing snow.
All the Kinds of Evening Light in Hartford
Cool Rayleigh-scattered blue light, warm also-Rayleigh-scattered sunset light, clean white LEDs reflecting off of snow, deep orange sodium lights—there’s every option visible from above Trinity College’s campus.
Date Palms in the Rain
Winter rain in Coachella Valley brings deep, somber hues to the monoculture arrays of date palms. I usually aim for depth and variety in my images, with a sense of definite space, so it’s an engaging game to depart from that and focus on a single plane and hypnotic pattern.
Roof of Clement
Like most infrastructure, a roof is something one generally ignores so long as it is functioning as expected. A heavy melt of snow, however, might call all of that into question. At least the view is good from up here.
Decaseconds 