HDR Photography
Summer hiking in nearby Colton’s Stone Valley is rapidly approaching, and with it, opportunities to see some of our odd (to me) local geology. Those enormous hollows are created by the movement of trapped pestle stones in the rapids water; the scattered evening light reveals their depths.
On this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year, the coastal roads through the Marin Headlands were completely packed with people searching for the perfect view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate.
This weekend marked the first truly warm days (i.e. spring) after a long winter, and there’s not long now until St. Lawrence’s students graduate on that sunset-lit quad at the center of the image.
A special weekend post: Happy Earth Day from Decaseconds!
A history of design and engineering is visible from the Marin Headlands in the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco beyond it. That’s visible at every hour of the day, so I must conclude that the people jamming the roads earlier on the evening of this image were mostly there for the combination effect with the sunset. As the crowds decamped for dinner elsewhere, the blue hour brought my favorite views of the city.
Most of my photographs are either calming or energizing, but it’s a rare image that makes me anxious. Storm clouds rolling over Portland, Oregon, however, have me running for cover.
The Mountain House seems to float above its eponymous lake—I’ve lately been imagining it as an overgrown version of Howl’s Moving Castle.
Good landscape photography advice: take your pictures from the top of the second tallest structure (or drone) around and let the tallest structure (like St. Lawrence’s Gunnison Chapel) cross the horizon.
From modern lasers to something a bit older: the lakeside view of Mohonk Mountain House, looking much as it has for more than 100 years. The sheer face of the cliff contines into the structure and reflects in the water.
In St. Lawrence’s Raman spectroscopy and microscopy lab, the most potent laser illumination source comes from a neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet. This is a pretty ubiquitous laser source, but I happen to like it because it also demonstrates the value of nonlinear optics: though this laser is emitting light at 1064 nanometers (in the infrared), a suitable doubling crystal can combine two of those 1064 photons together to make a shiny new 532 nm photon.
Mohonk’s Skytop appears as a small castle atop the hills near the hotel, but its reality is a bit more mundane: it was constructed as a watchtower for forest fires in the early twentieth century. Though no longer in use, it adds an extra hint of magic to the whole setting. The hotel (off to the left) sits on the water, and the tower touches the sky.
There are many ways to define the seasons, with varying degrees of usefulness. (Solstices and equinoxes seem to have only the thinnest connection with the weather.) Perhaps the most valuable differentiation between times of the year is when one can reasonably be out on the water: “Spring” is that first moment when an afternoon in a canoe doesn’t sound miserable.
Even the grandest of hotels have infrastructure that supports the guest experience. For a grand old hotel like Mohonk Mountain House, that infrastructure is charming enough to be interesting in its own right.
Those early-twentieth-century structures—boilers and exhaust stacks and hand-painted signs noting the protocols for refilling the massive fuel oil tanks.
The end of sabbatical meant saying “goodbye” to the Normandy Village and its quaint weirdness. I’ll always remember them as my collaborator described them: “The little Hansel and Gretel houses.”
Deep night colors on the snow cliffs contrast with the warm glow of the hotel; this could be an infrared image, mapping the local temperatures.
Decaseconds 