With snow removed after the storm, sports teams return to their respective fields to play beneath lights both natural and artificial.
Tracks in Trinity Snow
“Trinity Days” is our college’s late-winter break, which typically leaves campus quiet, but a coating of snow just before classes ended left an array of bootprints to mark their exit.
Rijksmuseum
Bright sky opens to reveal the sun between the spires of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Beneath the museum, a long tunnel reminds me of China Miéville’s “The City and the City” and its passages between overlapping worlds.
Peaking through the glass reveals an otherworldly modern interior that perhaps continues that Miéville theme in its own way.
Long Walk After Snow
Despite any efforts to the contrary, nostalgia sneaks into my life at moments I least expect. Trinity’s Long Walk was my undergraduate home for several years and this particular moment—a winter evening, as the sun goes down and the smell of dinner cooking in the dining hall climbs aboard the surprisingly warm breeze—was so evocative of the experiences that made me fall in love with campus 20 years ago.
Canal Gossip
Relaxing with in the shade by the canal on a summer afternoon is excellent, but zoom in and you’ll see that this young woman is laughing along with her friend who is almost perfectly hidden behind her.
Radiates Through the Chapel
Trinity College’s chapel is a beautiful piece of twentieth-century neo-Gothic architecture, but the interaction with the sunset sky brought a whole new appreciation for the structure. The gold light of the sky comes through the open belfry, but electrical lighting elements that shine up the structure from beneath the belfry happened to also match the sunset color and the position along the horizon, producing the odd trompe l’oeil of the structure appearing to allow the viewer to see through the mountains in the distance to even more sky beyond.
Amsterdam Aquaculture
The impression of plantlife in every edge of the Netherlands was one I expected to drop away as we entered more urban areas, but the canals of Amsterdam, too, were lined with green.
Bushnell Tower Isn’t Quite in the Skyline
Bushnell tower sits at one edge of the cluster of tall buildings that is Hartford’s downtown. It was originally meant to be accompanied by a partner adjacent to it that was never constructed—so instead, we get a view of the State Capitol.
Water Outside the Opera
The highly varied flotilla approaching the Dutch National Opera and Ballet speaks to a kind of imagined universality of classical art—where every citizen might gravitate to something high-minded.
An Amsterdam Streetcorner
A slice of life on an Amsterdam summer afternoon—café, busy streets, big clouds.
Travelers Tower at Peak Batman
Neither the neoclassical architecture nor the rain make this a “peak Batman” image—rather, it’s the interplay of spotlights with fog that creates what I would describe as “Batmanitude”.
Amsterdam Draw Bridge
This modest iron drawbridge in Amsterdam has a mid-nineteenth-century-ness that fits charmingly among the tall buildings and trees neighboring it.
Boats in Ommen
Though boats are an everyday part of Dutch life, the large fraction of these boats that were occupied by people living and traveling in them (thus not leisure-craft nor houseboats) leads me to believe that I observed the river-and-canal-going equivalent of the caravans also visible at the edges of the image.
Stopping Along the Ride
Travelers of all kinds pause for a moment in Amsterdam, and this long-distance bicyclist (see his touring rig hiding at the left side of the image) is no different. I like this moment apart, with a lone figure in the foreground but a massive crowd on the bridge and boat in the background.
Cold Dawn Nucleation
There’s some sang about the photographer, not the camera, mattering to a great shot; while I appreciate the value of having the right tools, this sunrise image captured in a quick moment with my phone on a 1ºF morning provides some evidence to support the theory. The low temperatures quickly nucleated ice crystals from towers across the city and produced this dramatic array of miniature clouds.
