HDR Photography
Nothing like Nik’s Analog pseudo-vintage photoprocessing to produce the maximally creepy image. This particular lamp at St. Lawrence, ensconced in the boughs of a maple tree, creates the best patters at night. The tendrils extending from a central bulb remind me of the structure of a neuron.
The Bay Area seems to experience seasons at a different pace from much of the rest of the country. Summer is a month-long period from mid-August through mid-September, fall lasts from October through March, and the summer goes from April until August. Winter (as the East Coast understands it) isn’t a part of the equation. Being back in fall, then, has me reminiscing about fall in the North Country, with leaves starting to dot the ground and the Blue Hour arriving sooner.
Berkeley’s undergraduate student population is still mostly gone for winter break, leaving UCB’s campus to resemble St. Lawrence’s during Fall Break in October. The empty-ish parking lots might be bleak, but at least it’s easy to get a table at lunch time.
And one final bonus from that fall weekend: a most dramatic and exciting picture of a most unexciting car. I present to you: the World’s Most Interesting Toyota RAV-4.
Across the reaches of North America scoured by glaciers, farms roll over hills atop rocky soil. This farm is on a hill, and its fields fall away in every direction.
Flashing back to a St. Lawrence University IHSA show from last fall: between the big jumps and competition, sometimes a rider just needs an M&M break.
We’re on our way out of the North Country, headed for a sabbatical in California, but the little houses (first built for mill workers) of Canton, New York will be there to welcome us back.
The overnight low was –16ºF, meaning that my robotic exploration of the skies has been put on pause for the moment. Back on those crisp fall days, though, there was nothing better than putting up the quadcopter and surveying St. Lawrence’s facilities. The riding stables and fields are one of the best places to spend a Friday afternoon, whether on the ground or in the air.
College campuses have long, tree-lined walks; those are great places to find this “yellow leaf tunnel” effect.
Without a nearby Interstate, materials move through the North Country along Route 11 in much the same way I imagine they did pre-1956. The Cascade diner and the Buccaneer Lounge beneath it, glowing with neon lighting on the right side of the picture, date from the early Interstate era. When I visit them for a burger and I beer, my mind always wanders to Eisenhower and Kennedy and the other presidents who presided over the development of the Interstate system. Highway access remains on the mind, I’m sure, of ever person who commutes in and out of the North Country, too.
Stick season has arrived, with orange everywhere. Holes in the trees have appeared and the optical topology has some new path options. Even the steel tracks now appear some copper other-metal.
Large-scale sculptures on college campuses set the tone of these places, focusing the on spaces for the mind to experiment and grow. I’ve always found it a bit ironic that the mind will grow to find these odd structures everyday and ordinary.
Admissions buildings are always charming, but the blue hour on a crisp fall afternoon creates optimal conditions for charm. Not a single leaf is out of place.
Even the small local farms of the North Country can seem overwhelmingly huge, and viewing them from a quadcopter’s vantage point doesn’t mitigate the effect.
The North Country is an unforgiving place during most of the year, but never more than during the depths of winter. Our first snow arrived last week, and I looked back through my photographs from last winter. The transition from summer is renders the landscape nearly unrecognizable.
A central theme to my photography is visualizing the progressive gradient from dense urban areas to natural settings. Some of my favorite images are cases where that gradient is particularly abrupt or unexpected. Until I began flying quadcopters, I didn’t expect that I’d be able to find the same transitions in the North Country, with its much more homogeneous rural structure. Here in Canton, however, the juxtaposition of apartment towers, shops, and bridges with forests, islands, and farmland creates a similar effect. The North Country supports this cultural difference between folks who live “in the village” and those who live “out of the village”.
A whole new point of view on the shadows of Gunnison Chapel across the quad. Much like my last post, I love the intentional alignments of the designs.
Decaseconds 
