HDR Photography
A poster of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” hung above my bed in college, and I’ve since then developed a love of Rückenfiguren in images. Building from my last post’s theme of self-portraiture, I thought using myself as the POV for an image in Stone Valley might add the right German Romantic vibe.
The first organisms to shift and adapt to a new season have always seemed to me like its harbingers. Here in the North Country, I’m noticing the first buds appearing on the maple trees—several weeks after their sap was harvested to make some delicious New York maple syrup—but back in the autumn, those same trees were the first to display their autumn foliage.
Bright Saturday morning sunshine warms Salisbury, Connecticut and make the town ski jump flash in the distance at the left of the image.
Earlier this week, I posted an image that used long exposure to contrast textures in a landscape. This image achieves a similar goal, but perhaps with even more drama and structure. The oblique lighting from the blue-hour sky exaggerates the sheets of stone that have been thrust forth from the Earth.
Neal Stephenson’s “Fall” suggests that that pattern of one’s childhood hometown is patterned deeply into the brain. This picture captures pretty much everywhere I could get to on my own (i.e., on my bike) when I was seven years old—so, basically my whole world at that point.
Is lunch better taken beneath the golden leaves of a tree in the open air, or inside a dining hall filled with friendly faces? The answer all depends on the season.
Does anything say “college life” more than an afternoon nap in the sunshine beneath autumn foliage?
This particular acute crossroads in Salisbury, Connecticut is home to the White Hart Inn, and it turns out that it’s photogenic in just about every season.
As a child, I dreamed of flying over my home town—viewing all of the familiar paths from high above. Visiting that town last weekend, I was able to photographically make that dream a reality. The forests where I hiked and the town ski jump are all laid out before the drone’s lens.
When an afternoon of riding at Fox Rust has finished, it’s back to the barn (in the distance), accompanied by a barn cat escort.
When an autumn day at St. Lawrence University ends with a storm above the Adirondacks, those horizon raindrops scatter warm hues back to the quadcopter camera.
Much like Manhattan’s Central Park, Prague’s Petřín is (in part) a demonstration of the will and effort required on the part of a city to maintain green spaces. Once they become part of the city’s identity (as in those aforementioned cases), they exist in a space orthogonal to modern real estate development.
Prague’s Charles Bridge is centuries-old, covered in statues, and seemly perpetually mobbed. We visited during the off-season (November) and never saw the bridge without plenty of company. Perhaps the best part of the visit, though, was staying adjacent to the bridge in the Smetana Hotel, looking out over the Vltava (and crossing the bridge on many of our adventures around the city.)
From up close, the hotel is easier to find, but small triangle park across the street from the hotel is still not visible from this angle, making the the geometry of the ground floor and the street outside escheresque.
The compactness of European cities, particularly ones like Prague that are situated in valleys, leads to these kinds of spectacularly vertical spaces. Each street seems to be stacked nearly on top of the next.
On the hilltops above those city streets, inside Prague Castle, the space continues to be used efficiently.
Above the castle structures, the spires of St. Vitus Cathedral continue the verticality.
Today’s image falls into the category “How have I not posted this already?” This image of a supermoon aligning with the Route 11 principal axis of Canton, New York has been used in the table of contents of St. Lawrence University’s magazine, as well as in several blog posts. In spite of that, I’ve apparently (according to Flickr’s camera roll feature) never shared it to Decaseconds.
Decaseconds 