HDR Photography
Monday’s post brought me back to the epic imagery of the Bay Area that I suspect I took a bit for granted back when we were starting Decaseconds in 2011. Convincing oneself that one is a photographer is easy when these are the views—but I’m glad I had the potency of these places to get me through those awkward early years of developing as a photographer.*
*Apologies for the wordplay.
A weird spate of “Bay Area weather”—cloudy and rainy in the morning, bright and sunny in the afternoon, chilly but not cold—has brought moments like these, picnicking on the grounds of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, back to my mind.
Neo-Gothic architecture demands dramatic, high-texture black-and-white and I know how to deliver.
Air-free chemical processes require specialized apparatus like the glass Schlenk line inside this dramatically lit fume hood.
Though even April doesn’t guarantee and escape from blizzards in New England, I’m nonetheless cathartically purging myself of wintery aesthetics, like I.M. Pei’s Bushnell Tower standing proud at the edge of Hartford’s downtown.
Calder’s “Stegosaurus” is an enormous color outlier in the neutral snow color scheme of downtown Hartford.
Hartford’s Pratt Street is closed to automobile traffic, but a cold and windy afternoon left it largely quiet of all traffic.
This barn cat at the Ethel Walker School’s stable really has no time for my shenanigans.
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.
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.
The Wadsworth and Travelers Tower frame Bushnell Tower, the State Capitol, and Bushnell Park, for a lovely postcard image of Hartford, Connecticut.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Decaseconds 