HDR Photography
In the past, I’ve photographed several Japanese gardens, and even St. Lawrence University’s own North Country Japanese Garden, but I’ve never been able to capture it like this before. From my quadcopter’s vantage point, I captured the geometry of Sykes Hall and the North Country Japanese Garden in the grids of streets and campus paths.
Saturday morning, on horseback, in an open field!
Though St. Lawrence has its share of modern buildings (including my own), it’s the old part of campus (buildings like Piskor and Sykes Halls) that best captures the Harry Potter vibe of small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.
In the woods of Hermon, New York, Uprooted played a show to celebrate the release of their new CD. The band’s name stems from its origins: all of its members are transplants to the North Country from across the US. Fitting, then, that the show took place in a home with many handcrafted wood details and structures. The audience stretched far back under the balcony where I hid to take this shot.
There’s spectacular luck involved in a tornado-warning-inducing storm abates just as sunset begins, leaving a rugged magenta sky in its wake. (Plus, I can’t fly the quadcopter in the rain.)
Autumn is my favorite season for flying above the North Country. Heading back toward New York, there’s a lot to look forward to with the shift in the seasons.
Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai in Manhattan towers above its neighbors and, for the most part, stands apart architecturally.
(Photographed the right way, it looks like some sort of cyberpunk corporate headquarters.)
Though most sports have an age of peak ability, English riding seems to be wide open to riders of all ages (though the cost of riding horses can remain a separate barrier.) Today, I wanted to look back at some of my portraits from past horse shows. First, a shot of young Hanna Rose Egan at the 2014 Kentucky Summer Classic.
I’ve heard that dogs and their people start to look similar, but I’ve never heard an equivalent edict for horses and their owners. Perhaps that should be reconsidered in light of this portrait from the 2014 Lake Placid show.
Mohonk’s gazebos are a signature of the hotel, and this particular structure is my favorite of them all. It’s not the biggest, or the most elaborate, but it benefits from being built on a concrete island projecting into the lake. At least to my eight-year-old self, that made it by far the coolest.
Canton’s bars are pretty specific in their target markets: bars for students, or for locals, or for the staff of the local schools. There’s not a lot of overlap. The Buccaneer Lounge, housed in the blue and white building at the lower right of today’s quadcopter photo, was the favorite hangout of faculty. The bar closed this winter, and (as with many third spaces) it will be missed.
Mohonk Mountain House’s parlor is far grander than the name might imply. After dinner, it’s the site of live entertainment. That could be a comedian, or a string quartet, or a band, or an animal trainer. The consistent variety could almost be called old-fashioned—matching the tone of the room.
Central Park is a classic—a place of almost incalculable value to literally millions of people. In that sense, it’s really surreal to find that there’s ever an empty place in it. Sunset on a windy, freezing night night is evidently the time.
Nothing like Nik’s Analog pseudo-vintage photoprocessing to produce the maximally creepy image. This particular lamp at St. Lawrence, ensconced in the boughs of a maple tree, creates the best patters at night. The tendrils extending from a central bulb remind me of the structure of a neuron.
The Bay Area seems to experience seasons at a different pace from much of the rest of the country. Summer is a month-long period from mid-August through mid-September, fall lasts from October through March, and the summer goes from April until August. Winter (as the East Coast understands it) isn’t a part of the equation. Being back in fall, then, has me reminiscing about fall in the North Country, with leaves starting to dot the ground and the Blue Hour arriving sooner.
Berkeley’s undergraduate student population is still mostly gone for winter break, leaving UCB’s campus to resemble St. Lawrence’s during Fall Break in October. The empty-ish parking lots might be bleak, but at least it’s easy to get a table at lunch time.
And one final bonus from that fall weekend: a most dramatic and exciting picture of a most unexciting car. I present to you: the World’s Most Interesting Toyota RAV-4.
Across the reaches of North America scoured by glaciers, farms roll over hills atop rocky soil. This farm is on a hill, and its fields fall away in every direction.
Decaseconds 
