HDR Photography
Though a city might not seem like the most obvious place to celebrate Earth Day, I’ve honestly been astonished since my move to Hartford just how many big old trees shelter the city. Between the greenery and the public transportation, this place gives me some optimism.
With the right perspective, this old elm can tower over even the top of the chapel on a just-post-storming spring evening.
Bright spring light graces the rooftops and treetops of Trinity College, even at the end of the day.
Perfect, breezy, warm, and effulgent spring days have sprawled across Trinity’s campus, rather like students on the quad. Grading papers in my office can at least be softened by an open window and the resulting smell of flowers.
When only the snow-coated branches of a tree stand out above the roofline of a nearby building, the result is a bright and dramatic view of their structure.
Trinity College’s Chapel is encrusted and decorated with two types of brightwork: both snow and scaffolding.
Bright sunshine scatters from treetops and roof peaks in Hartford. Buds begin to swell on branches around Trinity’s campus. When the weather is warm, it’s easy to feel that spring is just around the corner.
As the culmination of efforts that began in July 2023, moving an 800-lbs optical table into a third-story window of Clement Chemistry Building via forklift was remarkably less dramatic than might be expected. Once the window was removed, the rigging company made short work of the move—and were nice enough to let me get some shots of them in action with my drone.
Perhaps the best mark of a place I love is one that keeps its charm throughout the whole year. I only really enjoyed the North Country during the blaze of autumn foliage and I only really enjoy Coachella Valley during the mild temperatures and wet(ter) weather of winter. By comparison, Trinity College is beautiful at every moment of the year. A multilayer of serious snow arrived this weekend and finally brought Trinity into Winter Mode, confirming that this place is basically always fantastical.
After an unfortunate run-in with a tree on a windy day, my drone is repaired and back in the air. A big, dramatic sunset scene of Trinity College is the perfect capstone for may last day at work this semester. The repaired chapel seemed a fitting parallel to the repaired quadcopter.
On an otherwise rectilinear campus, the gentile bubble-arcs of Trinity College’s Gates Quad provide a relaxing geometry that mirrors the true uses of a quad in student life.
All along the this rise are the buildings of Trinity college: the Raether Library, Clement Chemistry Building, Northam Hall, the Chapel, and High Rise. Looking at them dramatically standing against the setting sun, I knew what I was thankful for this year: being here in Hartford, working at Trinity.
(Just as I can see my home from work, this is evidence that I can see work from home.)
Thanksgiving Break is upon us and Clement Chemistry Building is (mostly) quiet.
Scenery of Berkeley’s campus from Oppenheimer had me looking back again to my RAW files (as I’ve done recently) and finding exceptional images that benefited from my evolution in processing skills over the past decade. This particular December 2012 day marked my first walk to work with my then-new Nikon D7000, and so it was a moment in which I was viewing my quotidian surroundings through a literal new lens.
The light shining down on the little bridge over Strawberry Creek to the Faculty Club, for example, is a far more interesting image to me as a memory than it was at the moment I first processed these in 2012.
Quiet monuments, dappled by sunshine, feel different from a decade away.
Big, dramatic, and green are the themes of this bridge.
I was struck by how many portrait-orientation shots I had initially bypassed. The curving stairs in front of Latimer Hall always looked charming beneath late-autumn foliage.
These stairs down to Hildebrand Hall’s D Level were my typical path to my office. They were about as intimidating in real life as they look in this picture—squeeze between the edges of different intersecting buildings and utilities pass-throughs.
Leaving again at the end of the day, the afternoon sun on Latimer’s facade is starting to shift to an oranger hue.
The trip past the architecture school wasn’t one I typically made by 2012 (I moved from an apartment south of campus to one on the west side), but the light on its concrete architecture wasn’t to be missed.
Peak foliage on Trinity College’s campus looks as effulgent as always, but there’s an added perk in being able to see my downtown-Hartford home in the same shot. (It helps that the building is 27 stories tall, I’ll admit…)
