HDR Photography
Steam pipe repairs and upgrades outside Trinity College’s Clement Chemistry Building have introduced a dramatic, Star-Wars-worthy pit outside the building that suggests a far more interesting adventure than the realities of winter heating.
One of my earliest memories is climbing the rope into the hayloft of my grandfather’s sheep barn. As his advancing age prevented him from making the journey out to the barn, it slowly fell into disrepair, but I’m glad I was able to take a final trip to capture what Granddad always referred to as “the homestead”.
This little town on the shores of the Salton Sea is only a few blocks in each direction, a sort of echo of what might have been in a different ecological timeline. My favorite detail of the image, though, are the other lights away on the far shore of the Sea, just beneath the mountains, suggesting another world still out there.
Unlike past summers, when drought left central Kentucky crispy, a rainy summer produced lush foliage around the bridge over the South Elkhorn Creek.
Narrow sticks emerge at regular intervals from the water, silhouetted in the reflected sunset, raising more questions than they can answer along the shoreline of the evaporating Salton Sea.
Bushnell Tower was originally intended to have a twin rising next to it. Though the cost of the first tower ultimately scuttled plants for the second, echoes of the goal remain in the design. It wouldn’t have done to have windows looking directly into one’s neighbors, so the side of the building originally designed to face its partner was constructed with very few windows. My personal stance is to enjoy the little bit of strangeness in a world that threatens to become a bit more smoothed-down and homogenous.
As I noted last week, the gradual evaporation of the Salton Sea has left Bombay Beach with more and more of its namesake. The outlines of the town show where the earthen sea wall was constructed to protect it from flooding that now seems less and less likely; the comparatively more green-hued beach shows the areas that were more recently submerged.
The lights of the Hartford Public Library in the foreground provide a safer, more orderly home for the eye than the highly abnormal weather feature expanding forth around Travelers Tower like some portal to an evil dimension.
The slow disappearance of the Salton Sea has moved dramatic art pieces, like this tetrahedron that once rose mysteriously from the water, onto a broad expanse of beach where some of their magic evaporates with the sea.
When I added the “Ω” to the title of this image, I imagined endings across multiple dimensions of time: Certainly, a sunset is the end of a day, but I was also thinking on the longer scale of how the slow march of evaporation and desert climate are continuously shrinking the Salton Sea. In a more personal sense, this was likely to be my last visit to the Sea—at least in anything like its current state. All of those combined finalities made this one worthy of being the omega.
I-10 runs across the dry ancient lakebed that is now Coachella Valley and but the absence of easy bridges over the stark divider has produced some odd impacts on the resulting sprawl.
While my past approach to photography through aircraft windows was focused on avoiding distracting reflections, the realness of the Artemis II photos—specifically those with astronauts’ hands and faces reflected in spacecraft windows—made me appreciate how the nature of our relationship with Earth though technology can be conveyed. The drama of the American West is more impressive when it’s clear what altitude allowed us to visualize it.
That light in the sky is some strange and eerie scattering during a storm over the city that brought to mind nothing more than the sorts of occult summonings found in films like “Ghostbusters” or “To Cast a Deadly Spell.” Perhaps I’ve been playing too much Deadlock lately.
Beyond Hartford’s Town Hall in the foreground are city landmarks like the State capitol, Bushnell Tower, and Travelers Tower. The sunset is not an official Hartford landmark but it should be a skymark.
I.M. Pei’s Bushnell Tower is a palette for late-spring sunsets and clear skies in downtown Hartford.
Decaseconds 