HDR Photography
Winter crisps and desaturates the landscape, and draws the eye from the Northeast to places more southern, where I wonder if, “the grass is greener on the other side.” That might sometimes be an illusion, but then there are cases like this one: the grass is literally greener on the other side.
The rolling, bucolic hills of the Connecticut-New York border are one of my favorite places. The foothills of the Berkshires roll along under the late-autumn reds and browns, the clouds pucker towards rain overhead, and the decrepit skeletons of agriculture linger among the charming homes that now dominate the landscape.
That perfect New England Saturday morning: crisp fall air, vintage European bikes, bright red barns, out to get waffles.
After an enormous Thanksgiving dinner, we stood out in the cold, under the stars, and gazed into infinity at the disk of the Milky Way. The world feels small and calm on a noiseless fall night. I don’t know that I’d ever recognized the galaxy before.
Thanksgiving is around the corner, and New England has equilibrated to early-winter leafless distributions. On a morning coffee-and-breakfast-sandwich run, snow encrusted rocks form the boundaries of a real-world Zen garden.
A friend in northwestern Connecticut had me out to his property to photograph this amazing, craggy, ancient Linden tree. Vines cling to the heavy, sprawling shell of the tree, and it’s not a stretch to imagine fairies flitting between the leaves. Nothing captures fantastical rays of light like f/22 aperture. Every ray and every bent photon is transmogrified into beams and rainbows from the dimension of quantum uncertainty.
Perhaps acorns scattered on the beach don’t really count as castles (as in I, II, III, and IV of the series), but the neural pathways (cliché incoming: imagination) of a six-year-old, they can be elegant abodes of elves or the landing pods of a tiny invasion force. I think they fit the theme nicely. During my trip to Connecticut last week (again, tragically bereft of my Nikon), I visited Lake Wononscopomuc, where I spent the summers (and winters) of my youth. It brought my back to the thinking of that “miniature me,” if only for a few minutes.
I’m down in New Haven, CT for a conference—a great opportunity to shoot a classic American east-coast city, you say? But my camera is doing double duty shooting horses this weekend! What is a photographer without a camera (and with a lovely view of New Haven in the morning from the top of the Omni Hotel) to do? I’m not the biggest evangelist for iPhone photography, but in a pinch (and with the help of a handy bracketing app), it’s possible to account for a lot of the device’s shortcomings and produce photos that can transmit at least a degree of the desired effect. For the ubiquitous “multitool in your pocket,” that’s pretty good.
Trinity College’s gargantuan Neo-Gothic chapel is never more intimidating than at early dusk in the winter. The pale stone and the snow on the ground exert a pressure in the brain of everyone around them. In capturing an image of the chapel, perhaps I can bottle some of that intensity.
(And I had the opportunity to continue my recent trend of 1:1 aspect ratio photographs, to boot!)
Perhaps my last post in the cozy, wood-lined chambers of Timberline Lodge put me in mind of winter excursions. From the windy top of Lion’s Head in northwestern Connecticut, the view of three states is incredible. The snow clings to branches from a recent storm, and a few wisps of cloud mark the horizon in an otherwise azure sky. This snowsuit caught my eye, and I particularly liked the way only a single hand of human being is visible, poking out from the bundled layers.
When winter alights on the Northeast, there’s a quiet stillness that seeps through the land and makes the world feel underpopulated. That birds, so small and delicate, still fly in this stillness amazes me.
This hill in northwestern Connecticut is, tragically, not really named “Dragon Mountain.” That never kept my elementary-school-aged self from calling it that. The way it rises, green and different, from the surrounding winter landscape brought to mind Smaug, sleeping under the mountain. At age seven, I half-wished that it would awaken and soar above the miniature houses below.
During the blazing August heat, looking back to winter pictures leads to the oddest “time machine effect.” As you can see from the rapidly filling tire tracks in the driveway, we barely made it home ahead of what turned out to be a fierce storm. The comfort of “I don’t have to go out there” is so amplified when standing on a perfect porch, next to the door to a cozy house, and seeing the frozen, dark contrast in the graveyard across the way.
Waterfalls don’t necessarily have the same impressive drama from the top, but they present another kind of wonder: the calm, burbling stream that disappears to infinity, replaced by the view of a sylvan landscape beyond. The pebbles and the trees contrast in lengthscale dramatically, but they all “belong” here.
I cooked up a bonus Sunday post: from the same waterfall on Mt. Riga where I took last week’s picture,another shot of the lovely swimming hole (and perhaps a broader perspective on what makes it such an incredibly lovely place to relax on a muggy summer afternoon.)
Decaseconds 