HDR Photography
Outside Trinity College’s Jackson Hall stands this enormous oak tree. It was there when I was a student, and I remember looking out the window at it through the changing seasons. Though a tiny corner of campus (and perhaps unremarkable), this place holds a lot of personal meaning to me.
The red-roofed Outing Club building has all kinds of odd decorations that have made it a frequent subject for me in the past; this sunset view puts my previous work in a rather different context. St. Lawrence University’s campus is just across the street, and the town of Canton is down the road in the distance.
Though Decaseconds isn’t about to become an auto blog, there’s something about a car in the environment for which it was practically designed (like a tiny Peugot in Paris, a Miata on a racetrack, or a manual transmission, turbocharged, German wagon in the Adirondacks) that looks just right.
Universities think on long timescales (decades and centuries) and as a result, the oldest building on St. Lawrence’s campus (Richardson, on the right) overlooks the newest addition (the quad in front of Kirk Douglas Hall).
Though school may be out “forever” when summer arrives, there’s a stillness that overtakes the campus of which I am not particularly fond. At the start of this spring semester, campus is bustling. Is it ironic that campus is “alive” when frozen solid, but “dead” when it looks like this.
Sunsets might be a cliché subject for a landscape photograph, but the North Country’s specimens offer such glowing, striated features with such regularity that the truly exceptional examples can strain my belief in atmospheric models of cloud formation and light scattering.
Winter’s lockdown continues (it might warm up above -10ºF today!), but spring will eventually return. The footbridge to SUNY Canton will eventually be free of ice and the smallest hints of leaves will peak out from the tree branches.
Next week marks the beginning of the Spring 2019 semester. I’m shocked that it has arrived so quickly, and sure that I’ll be equally shocked when the end arrives in May; that was definitely the case last year.
On a chunky rock in the middle of the Grasse River through Canton, New York, the lack of good soil has kept the trees small and bonsai-esque.
This quiet winter evening (Christmas day, as it turns out) presented a delicate mirroring between sky and earth, broken by the presence of a single buoy.
St. Lawrence University’s campus is quiet for the moment; athletes have returned early from break but pretty much everyone else is still on winter vacation. The snow adds an extra layer of dampening.
When they return, the school will once again take on its weird ski lodge vibe.
I’ve looked across the Twin Lakes to this odd little stone tower for at least two decades, but have still never traveled over there to figure out what it is. Maybe it will stay mysterious forever.
Professionally, 2018 was a good year: my sabbatical work was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. That came from a long time writing and a long time in this lab.
Berkeley Lab’s Frei Group was kind enough to share their space with me, and I could not have done that work without this high vacuum line. I’ve always loved the way understanding the components of a system can take a complicated image like this one and break it into understandable parts. This image, in particular, gets less odd after the realization that this is two lines, mounted back-to-back, in the same Unistrut frame.
When winter is temporarily interrupted (as it is today in Northern New York) by a sudden thaw and double aliquot of rain, the ice on the Grasse River breaks up and clusters around the rocks and islands. This path in Canton, New York has been rendered impassable by a pack of rogue ice forced between the two sets of stairs by the high water.
Decaseconds 