HDR Photography
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.
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 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.
Way back when the Sun was inescapable, a pack crowd baked in UV radiation while watching CSI Greenwich.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Big winter storms make for salty, chaotic snow piles alongside the symmetrical Neo-Gothic architecture of Hartford’s Trinity College.
From “open for business” to “sleeping on the dock,” Mohonk Mountain House’s boats present lovely repeating patterns.
As summer jobs go, lifeguarding on Lake Mohonk seems like a pretty good one.
