HDR Photography
Traveling back to California for the first time since I left in 2013, I realized I had forgotten the little but important differences: the streets are crowded with cars instead of trucks and the air is saturated with a different set of volatile organic compounds.
From another perspective and at another time, this photograph captures the same Omni hotel and Petco Park from one of my earliest Decaseconds posts, almost four years ago. How odd to be back again.
Glaze ice really makes an incredible sight in full sunlight.
St. Lawrence’s Geology Department faculty take students out of their everyday dorm-gym-class world and bring them to the nature surrounding our campus. When winter locks down the Adirondacks, those adventures can’t happen as frequently. I imagine they must be looking forward to the end of winter more than most.
Even at the end of this winter-that-wasn’t, the North Country wouldn’t let us get away without gorgeous glaze ice and snow-packed roads. Is any day crisper than the one after an epic storm?
If only the title of this post had proven true. On a warm September day, I was ready to soar over the North Country aboard a hot air balloon! Going up a few stories and returning to earth was charming in its own way (and other people needed their turn), but I had been expecting so much more.
Summer on a college campus (with all of the energy of a reunion weekend) buzzes and burbles with the remembered excitement of perfect afternoons. On the quad of Trinity College, in the shadow of elm trees and the enormous Neo-Gothic chapel, this reaches its apex. I particularly enjoy the father and son talking on the bench in the foreground, adding a touch of the intimate to an otherwise crowded scene.
I’ve continued experimenting with Aurora HDR software, and I’ve confirmed my earlier opinion that it is an excellent tool for surreal, enticing night shots and cases where the noise would be too high for any other HDR technique. For realistic HDR with natural lighting, however, Photomatix remains the king.
A pony farm nestled in the hills of northern Vermont: with a ring and a pond by the house, what more can a young American dream of?
(At the moment I took this picture, the answer was, “snow.”)
When I’m in the first row, inches from the action of St. Lawrence’s DIV I women’s hockey, there’s no better lens than my 35 mm prime. That lens let me capture this Last-Supper-esque shot of six players all chasing the puck; they’re all roughly equidistant from me, making the shot slightly flat and surreal, like a splash page in a comic book.
This picture comes with added good new: the women’s team won their first playoff game this weekend!
Glaze ice entombs the branches of trees in the courtyard of St. Lawrence University’s Johnson Hall of Science in the aftermath of last weeks. The view out my office window is much improved.
The regular ice hockey season has ended (and the playoffs are ahead!), but it went out on a great note: St. Lawrence crushed Brown 3–0. The very similar nature of the school colors helped the aesthetics. Then there was the actual play: the three Brown players against one St. Lawrence player about measured the balance of power. It made for some odd and dynamic hockey.
Ice and snow and real winter have locked down the countryside, but I still have the photographic evidence of our ultra-mild, el-Niño-powered January.
An ice storm has transformed campus; I’ve never seen it this beautiful. For the folks in admissions (like the tour guide and family in this photograph), that must be a boon!
St. Lawrence’s campus becomes extra strange and ski-resort-esque when a fresh layer of snow is cleared by night. When morning arrives, paths are “magically” clear.
Real winter arrived with a horrible stillness. When the temperature is -25ºF, nothing moves and nothing melts and every bit of solid water stays just where you leave it. Even the tiny twigs and branches were stuck in its embrace.
I wanted to look back briefly on the structures of St. Lawrence University’s campus under lockdown from heavy snow. The oldest buildings, like Herring-Cole Hall, are naturals.
This little shed is in odd scale with the buildings around it, but its little puddle of light fits perfectly with the evening.
I’ve always grown to love the mid-twentieth-century buildings like the ODY Library. The lights, snow, and scaffolding among the trees put me in mind of Soviet science fiction.
Here is another example from around the same time period, Bewkes Science Hall. In my mind, authors of speculative fiction must be hiding behind the drawn blinds and imagining snowy, cyberpunk futures of the late 1990s.
Decaseconds 
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