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.
Category: Hartford
Summit Street in Late Winter
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.
Wadsworth and Travelers
The Wadsworth and Travelers Tower frame Bushnell Tower, the State Capitol, and Bushnell Park, for a lovely postcard image of Hartford, Connecticut.
Spring Almost Arrives to Campus
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.”
Golden Dome, Green Park
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.
Snow Off of Cook
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.
Night Snow Plow
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.
All the Kinds of Evening Light in Hartford
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.
Roof of Clement
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.
Under Arches, ‘Neath Snow
Big winter storms make for salty, chaotic snow piles alongside the symmetrical Neo-Gothic architecture of Hartford’s Trinity College.
Super Cold Morning
Some subzero mornings make rising from the bed nonetheless worthwhile. Billowing clouds of water vapor converting quickly to ice crystals produced this entrancing pattern, in which the plumes shifted from being lighter than the sky to darker, depending on position and density.
Forbidden Pseudo-Symmetry
This connecting courtyard between two Travelers buildings in Hartford has been blocked from foot traffic (I was shooting through a high fence), making it a strange forbidden liminal space. That the two buildings facing each other aren’t actually symmetrical—despite echoing one another—makes it feel like a sort of forbidden zone where reality has faulted somehow.
Nanomaterials on the Stir Rod
Photographing progress in the research lab can be so useful for answering that future question: “Did it really look like this last time we ran this experiment?” Our memories are imperfect, but so too is an image of a sample if one adjusts the processing settings to amplify saturation or contrast beyond reality. Sometimes, the goal of capturing something true to life overlaps with capturing something aesthetically pleasing, and then I have to share this image of freshly synthesized nanopowder clinging via static electricity to the end of a glass stirring rod.
Snow & Scaffolding on the Chapel
Snow and scaffolding are each the kind of dramatic additions to a neo-gothic building that suggest the dramatic climax of a noir film will take place on its rooftop.
Flag Shadow on Chapel
Passing Trinity College’s chapel on a crisp winter afternoon, I saw the nearby flag casting a dramatic shadow onto the stark white surface of the building and it was too perfect a shot to ignore.
Decaseconds 