Just before a snowstorm battered the northeast, we’ve escaped back to the desert. The rocks are craggy, the nights are weirdly cold, and there’s always a palm tree swaying in the distance.
Tiny Figures and Big Rocks
Can you spot the tiny figures at the top of the hill? I’m confident that tiny figures produce a sense of grand scale in images—particular desert shots, like this one, where the inhuman nature of the place can make understanding the sizes of objects difficult. Nonetheless, I find myself wondering how small the figures in an image can be before the viewer loses the ability to recognize them as human.
Irish Goodbye
The view from the aircraft window while departing Dublin Aiport was quintessentially Irish on this particular morning.
A Chance Return
Big changes are coming to the world of Decaseconds: Next fall, I’ll be returning to Trinity College (my alma mater) as their newest physical chemistry professor.
I took this picture of Trinity’s chapel, framed by foliage, as I packed up my car to leave at the end of my interview. Though I didn’t yet know what I do now (I’m going back there!), the warm breeze and familiar smells and satisfaction of a successful interview left me with a sense of calm, comfort, and peace.
Water Escape: Coachella Valley
Coachella Valley is a desert that was once home to a lake, so careful management of water—both where it should go, and where it shouldn’t—leads to some fascinating human-engineered structures. I like this image for the sense of depth, but also for the way that the unmodified hills rise above the human-produced forms in the fore- and mid-ground.
Within the Red Room
The National Gallery of Ireland has plenty of galleries with the white walls that I expected of an art museum; stepping from monochromatic spaces into this deep red room was a figuratively visceral experience.
County Buildings
Canton is the seat of St. Lawrence County. The multistory stone buildings amongst the sea of single-family homes that out here because they (and the church steeples) are the only structures tall enough to catch the remaining red light of sunset.
Farms in the North Country
Sustainable farming has found a home in New York’s North Country.
Nightfall on Guinness
Off for a Hike
My favorite images are those that contrast (apparently) natural and human-populated places. Escaping all of the noise of the holidays to a hike in the desert has a certain appeal at this time of year.
East on Route 11 in Autumn
Today’s image comes from along the same trajectory as my Cantonhenge shot, but farther down the path of Route 11. In the foreground, parks, businesses, and homes cluster around the center of Canton, New York.
Preparing for Winter
When winter arrives, the last of the garden needs to be harvested and wood needs to be stacked.
Red Light on Red Brick
Deep reds and purples stretch across campus at sunset. My favorite time to capture with my drone is the moment between when campus’s lights come on and the sun finishes setting—that time in which the two sources of illumination are dueling.
Descending the Trail
Nothing makes the incredible scale of a western landscape apparent like some tiny people navigating the scene.
Main Street Crossroads at Sunset
The topology of a town, the shapes of its roads and the storefronts that citizens navigate each day, shifts from quotidian reality when bathed in sunset light and seen from several hundred feet up.
