HDR Photography
There’s a bit of irony that a 10-year reunion, an opportunity to wander around campus and feel nostalgia, occurs during the summer—a season when I never experienced campus when actually a student.
My favorite little detail of this image is the airplane contrail just past the crescent moon.
Trinity College’s Chemistry Department, site of the invention of cyanoacrylate adhesives, still resides in the neo-gothic Clement Hall. During our time there in the early 2000s, the Harry-Potter-esque design combined with the “magical” reactions we ran made it easy to view the building as precisely the place real-world wizards would work.
Spring Break officially ended at St. Lawrence University today, but the students haven’t returned to campus. We’ve started remote learning. The structures of campus look the same but feel different when they’re mostly empty.
Our campus’s oldest building (Richardson Hall, just below) and its newest building (Kirk Douglas Hall, farther down) match with a certain degree of symmetry, but while the older building’s symmetry is pretty flawless, the newer building adds wings and windows that disrupt the pattern.
Haunted buildings on St. Lawrence’s campus seem all the creepier now that most students have been sent home for remote learning.
Battling the breezes of late summer above the fallow fields of the North Country, this image might appear to be capturing the edge of a farm. In fact, this is the southeastern reach of St. Lawrence University’s rural campus. The stables, home of our IHSA riding team, are off in the distance.
Dana Dining Hall looks warm and inviting on a cold winter night; I think the car passing quickly by (rather than standing still in the cold, like me) had the right idea.
Blankets of snow look good around St. Lawrence University’s Johnson Hall of Science.
The admissions building at Trinity College is now more than ten years old, but its stark stone structures still look mostly new. There’s a timeless Avalon quality to the setting, and the addition of a round table completes the picture.
When foot upon foot of snow stacks up outside, looking back to pictures from springtime on St. Lawrence’s campus helps to remind me that this condition is not permanent.
St. Lawrence University is renovating its historic Apple Arena, home of the Skating Saints, and the project is entering its final phases. Back in May, however, the foundations were just being poured and the skeleton of the structure was laid bare. Can you spot the steeple of Gunnison Memorial Chapel on the horizon?
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.
November snow means the football fields, like everything else in the North Country, need to be plowed.
When spring shades into summer and the students go home for break, the campus is oddly empty for the best weather it ever sees. The empty dorms feel a bit like the result of a very tidy zombie apocalypse.
I’ve been capturing images of Johnson Hall of six years, and though the building itself stays the same, the trees outside have shifted and grown (and some died) over time. Time marches on.
Decaseconds 