Alongside landscapes and seascapes, I’m presenting a skyscape. Alternative blue skies and marine layers presented little aerial grandeur in the Bay Area, but the East Coast offers expanses of badass clouds in excess.
Category: Canton
Walk in the Woods I
Urban campuses are folded up and compact, an array of buildings and narrow pathways between them. Quads are a sacrifice on the order of placing Central Park in the middle of Manhattan. St. Lawrence’s campus is literally thousands of acres, much of which is still fields or forests. College is a different experience for students who can go for a hike or hop in a canoe for the afternoon without leaving campus.
After the Students Are Gone 2016
Commencement was yesterday, and I’m proud to see my students move beyond college—but the quiet, empty campus starts to resemble a Zen garden more than a school.
Small College Town
There are a lot of small, rural towns with the odd culture bloom of colleges planted in their cores. I think it’s the ancillary buildings, the old fraternities and club houses with their mix of higher grandeur and shabbier paint, that most signal one of these villages
That extra school year energy of students wandering the campus at all hours provides an extra energy to a sleepy place. I miss it in the summer.
Last Sunset of Spring 2016
Semesters mostly end in a slow burn to the end of final exams. There’s a different end date for almost every student; only seniors share a collective terminus at graduation (and they’re too conflicted about the whole thing to really enjoy it, I’ve noticed.) Last year, I used Decaseconds to document the feeling of the campus contracting, like a balloon in liquid nitrogen, at the end of the semester. This year, the sky and the sun seemed ready to provide a dramatic end to this semester’s classes.
Fusion Ball
That Newtonian worldview (one of cause and effect, of a Universe that is fundamentally understandable), so often criticized as unromantic and clinical, makes this setting transform: where there was once a bucolic sunset over empty fields, there is now a repeating pattern of polymerized sugars on an iron-cored planet, gravitationally bound to a thermonuclear fireball. Isn’t that cooler?
Barn and Birches
Suddenly, the grass is infinitely green and thick and the trees have buds again. There’s this fundamentally Scandinavian feeling to the rolling hills and pine forests of the North Country that is best captured in spring and early summer. The world looks like a Bob Ross painting.
Fallow
Spring comes slowly to the North Country, and the weather always seems to far outpace the biological response. The trees give no indication that temperatures have remained solidly in the “warm” category for weeks now. I remain hopeful for the photosynthetic inevitability.
Ultimate Tree
Glaze ice really makes an incredible sight in full sunlight.
Snow on Geology
St. Lawrence’s Geology Department faculty take students out of their everyday dorm-gym-class world and bring them to the nature surrounding our campus. When winter locks down the Adirondacks, those adventures can’t happen as frequently. I imagine they must be looking forward to the end of winter more than most.
Ice World I
Even at the end of this winter-that-wasn’t, the North Country wouldn’t let us get away without gorgeous glaze ice and snow-packed roads. Is any day crisper than the one after an epic storm?
Can’t Hold My Balloon Down
If only the title of this post had proven true. On a warm September day, I was ready to soar over the North Country aboard a hot air balloon! Going up a few stories and returning to earth was charming in its own way (and other people needed their turn), but I had been expecting so much more.
September Street
I’ve continued experimenting with Aurora HDR software, and I’ve confirmed my earlier opinion that it is an excellent tool for surreal, enticing night shots and cases where the noise would be too high for any other HDR technique. For realistic HDR with natural lighting, however, Photomatix remains the king.
After the Puck!
When I’m in the first row, inches from the action of St. Lawrence’s DIV I women’s hockey, there’s no better lens than my 35 mm prime. That lens let me capture this Last-Supper-esque shot of six players all chasing the puck; they’re all roughly equidistant from me, making the shot slightly flat and surreal, like a splash page in a comic book.
This picture comes with added good new: the women’s team won their first playoff game this weekend!
Crystal Garden
Glaze ice entombs the branches of trees in the courtyard of St. Lawrence University’s Johnson Hall of Science in the aftermath of last weeks. The view out my office window is much improved.
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