HDR Photography
This Adirondack-y bridge connects SUNY Canton’s campus to town across a branch of the Grasse River. The photograph is a metaphor for the college experience: being a little apart from the regular world, in a place that’s just a bit magical. On one side of the bridge are normal houses, normal roads, normal life; across the bridge is a gently lit path through the woods. Very Rivendell-esque?
The North Country, like many rural places in America, has rugged expanses of nature abutting everyday locations. Example: the Buccaneer Lounge has this marvelous array of rapids just past its charming array of picnic tables.
It’s hard to tell from looking at the lake, even with the plaque in front of you, just how massive the Watauga Dam is… until you turn around. It’s actually pretty disorienting to look at what looks like a normal lake, then turn around and see the valley that the lake used to be. And when you look down the slope at the valley floor below you really start to understand how deep the lake really is.
Visiting nearby Canada means looking at a mirror-version of the United States, reflected across the border. Like looking in a mirror, everything is still recognizable. Up is still up. Down is still down. But the brands and the metric units and the nationalism is different. Does looking in the reflection of Ottawa in the Shaw Centre reverse the transformation?
An added bonus: this is technically a self-portrait, with my tiny self down in the foreground.
I remembered my tripod but forgot the quick release plate so I had to hand hold my shots. Still, pretty impressed without this shot of the falls turned out. Laurel Run park near Kingsport, TN is a real gem with some good, accessible hiking trails featuring some pretty scenery. Would hike again!
It’s a bar. It’s a diner. It’s a motel. Here’s a structural distillation of mid-twentieth century America; it’s the kind of place to drive you car, drink your beer, then lay down for a good night’s sleep.
Summer hit the North Country like a truck, ricocheting us from frosty mornings to hyperdense afternoons in the space of a single week. Out in nature, the volatile organic compounds are thick on the breeze. Even the sky is bluer. Above Lampson Falls, everything is placid.
Camping on the beach beneath the falls is grand—though less so when a thunderstorm is right around the corner. The beach shows evidence of the water readily rising.
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.
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.
Another shot of the Channels. I’ll definitely be going back to that spot.
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.
Like many East Coasters, I hadn’t heard of the marine layer until my first visit to the West Coast. The odd, damped mornings in coastal cities seem so at odds with the view of California in popular culture. Even sunny San Diego is matte and dull under a blanket of morning clouds.
Spring time is one of my favorite times for a hike. The leaves are green but its not too buggy, not too hot, and not too hazy.
Gaze over an enormous, Western, natural landscape, full of Bob-Ross-esque mountains, full of happy little trees. (Well, mostly happy. Probably not the ones in the areas that have been clear-cut.) HDR techniques make images detailed and unreal and unnatural; wet-plate effects (courtesy Analog Effex Pro 2) make images soft and faded. Using the two together, as in this photo of Mt. Jefferson taken from Mt. Hood, makes for something more supernatural than unnatural.
Students bring energy and excitement to my world, so there’s no more exciting time of the year than the start of fall. Though the school year has just ended and summer is beginning, I’m already looking forward to the next season. I live in some bizarro-world version of what I remember experiencing as a boy, when I awaited the start of summer and dreaded the return of the school year.
