HDR Photography
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.
Strolling down the stairs from Prague Castle at dinner time sure feels a lot easier than making the reverse trip earlier in the day.
Autumn may not be peak tourist season in Prague, but the remaining foliage makes for an effective supplement to the red and white that otherwise dominate the city’s color palette.
Bob-Ross-ian “happy little trees” may look their best in autumn, but I’m not sure they’re at their happiest while heading into dormancy.
A big view of a little building: St. Lawrence University’s Herring Cole Reading Room. Though it was once a library, it’s now the best study space on campus.
A consistent theme in my posts over the past few weeks has been “reflection,” raising the question: Am I feeling particularly introspective, or have I just been finding great views with water ?
In the depths of the humid dog days of summer, I already feel myself cooling off from a reminder of the crisp afternoons of fall.
The little islands in Canton’s stretch of the Grasse River make me think of Huckleberry Finn’s stops along the Mississippi but, you know, scaled down.
Very late last fall, we left the already-frigid upstate New York for a weekend in Napa.
During that trip, we visited the Bond-villain-esque Palmaz Vineyards. Almost the entire winery is underground in an 18-story cavern, using gravity to feed grapes and nascent wine from level to level. These enormous fermentation tanks are on a 24-tank rotating rail system so that each can be filled.
Even the dormant vines in “winter” give the setting an idyllic, “classical landscape” look.
Using a fisheye lens to photography water is a little too on the nose, but I love seeing the colors and patterns in the Grasse river along with so much of the rocks and the bank and the other bank, too.
Winter grays have locked down the North Country, but my photographs still contain the memories of a gorgeous fall. Now if only the polished, crystalline, snowy winter would arrive; I’m done with stick season.
This nineteenth-century water tower in the North Country hamlet of Heuvelton, New York is scheduled for demolition (or disassembly, really) to make way for its modern replacement. In the process of preparing the site, however, it was discovered that the original graveyard that was moved to make room for the tower was, uh, not so thoroughly moved as originally assumed. Now, biological anthropologist Prof. Mindy Pitre and her team are on site (beneath the oak tree) to properly finish the job. I joined her for an afternoon to photodocument the site and its tower before ongoing construction forever alters it.
