HDR Photography
This weekend, my wife and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary alongside Trinity College‘s bicentennial. Given that we met at college, the symmetry felt impactful. Though the fireworks might not have been intended to be exclusively for us, they felt just a little extra special.
The move to Hartford has offered me the opportunity to capture this time sequence (like the ones I took in Kentucky and the North Country) with a dramatic view of Travelers Tower over the course of a day. If the image appeals, it’s also available as a dynamic wallpaper for macOS that will change your desktop with the time of day.
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Moving to downtown Hartford, Connecticut placed this view just outside my window. I used to look across the city to Travelers Tower (the illuminated building at right) from my dorm room at Trinity College; 15 years later, I realize it shone like a beacon because it was being actively lit from nearby rooftops. Perhaps that’s a good lesson for life: the achievements that stand out don’t do so by accident, but because of conscious effort.
Big changes are coming to the world of Decaseconds: Next fall, I’ll be returning to Trinity College (my alma mater) as their newest physical chemistry professor.
I took this picture of Trinity’s chapel, framed by foliage, as I packed up my car to leave at the end of my interview. Though I didn’t yet know what I do now (I’m going back there!), the warm breeze and familiar smells and satisfaction of a successful interview left me with a sense of calm, comfort, and peace.
While I was a student at Trinity, all of the lighting on campus was from orange sodium vapor lamps. The transition to white LED lighting has made a dramatic shift in the feel of the place at night, but the golden hue of the chapel here provides a little nostalgic taste of the one-time colors of the place.
The building density of an urban campus like Trinity College’s makes for lots of retaining walls and stairs and additional structure. A well-designed campus is a delightful place to explore.
Trinity College’s “concrete jungle” of dorms have some surprisingly cool architecture for utilitarian dorm buildings.
Though much of Trinity College’s campus has switched to white LED lights, this section still has the orange sodium lights I remember from my days as a student.
Jarvis B was my dormitory during my freshman year at Trinity College. Before it was renovated into quads, it was once a block-long hallway of architectural weirdness.
The first warm days of the spring immediately put me in mind of summer nights.
Trinity College’s Long Walk was my home for four years, and I still find its warm evening glow to be comforting.
At the northern end of Trinity College’s Long Walk is the Dean’s Office. On a warm summer evening ‘neath the elms, however, it’s less an intimidation and more a charmer alongside the rest of the red stone structure.
There’s a bit of irony that a 10-year reunion, an opportunity to wander around campus and feel nostalgia, occurs during the summer—a season when I never experienced campus when actually a student.
My favorite little detail of this image is the airplane contrail just past the crescent moon.
Trinity College’s Chemistry Department, site of the invention of cyanoacrylate adhesives, still resides in the neo-gothic Clement Hall. During our time there in the early 2000s, the Harry-Potter-esque design combined with the “magical” reactions we ran made it easy to view the building as precisely the place real-world wizards would work.
The admissions building at Trinity College is now more than ten years old, but its stark stone structures still look mostly new. There’s a timeless Avalon quality to the setting, and the addition of a round table completes the picture.
