HDR Photography
The perfect frame appears: trees on either side, gentle river in the distance, and a path to the intersection between them. Canton homes are just around the corner. Civilization can wait. Skinny Bob Ross trees are welcoming the path and the river together. Happy little ferns!
The North Country has rough, glacier-hewn landscapes and a culture of independence. How this area is understood and depicted is often a matter of choice on the part of the photographer. Case in point: the path of the Grasse River, on its way to the the St. Lawrence Seaway. Look at all that beautiful early-spring nature!
But cropping can deceive: if I pan the camera to the right, you see a much different image. The Grasse River travels through downtown Canton, past parking lots and apartment complexes. I think I might prefer the more honest juxtaposition.
This Adirondack-y bridge connects SUNY Canton’s campus to town across a branch of the Grasse River. The photograph is a metaphor for the college experience: being a little apart from the regular world, in a place that’s just a bit magical. On one side of the bridge are normal houses, normal roads, normal life; across the bridge is a gently lit path through the woods. Very Rivendell-esque?
The North Country, like many rural places in America, has rugged expanses of nature abutting everyday locations. Example: the Buccaneer Lounge has this marvelous array of rapids just past its charming array of picnic tables.
It’s a bar. It’s a diner. It’s a motel. Here’s a structural distillation of mid-twentieth century America; it’s the kind of place to drive you car, drink your beer, then lay down for a good night’s sleep.
Alongside landscapes and seascapes, I’m presenting a skyscape. Alternative blue skies and marine layers presented little aerial grandeur in the Bay Area, but the East Coast offers expanses of badass clouds in excess.
Urban campuses are folded up and compact, an array of buildings and narrow pathways between them. Quads are a sacrifice on the order of placing Central Park in the middle of Manhattan. St. Lawrence’s campus is literally thousands of acres, much of which is still fields or forests. College is a different experience for students who can go for a hike or hop in a canoe for the afternoon without leaving campus.
Commencement was yesterday, and I’m proud to see my students move beyond college—but the quiet, empty campus starts to resemble a Zen garden more than a school.
There are a lot of small, rural towns with the odd culture bloom of colleges planted in their cores. I think it’s the ancillary buildings, the old fraternities and club houses with their mix of higher grandeur and shabbier paint, that most signal one of these villages
That extra school year energy of students wandering the campus at all hours provides an extra energy to a sleepy place. I miss it in the summer.
That Newtonian worldview (one of cause and effect, of a Universe that is fundamentally understandable), so often criticized as unromantic and clinical, makes this setting transform: where there was once a bucolic sunset over empty fields, there is now a repeating pattern of polymerized sugars on an iron-cored planet, gravitationally bound to a thermonuclear fireball. Isn’t that cooler?
Suddenly, the grass is infinitely green and thick and the trees have buds again. There’s this fundamentally Scandinavian feeling to the rolling hills and pine forests of the North Country that is best captured in spring and early summer. The world looks like a Bob Ross painting.
Spring comes slowly to the North Country, and the weather always seems to far outpace the biological response. The trees give no indication that temperatures have remained solidly in the “warm” category for weeks now. I remain hopeful for the photosynthetic inevitability.
Glaze ice really makes an incredible sight in full sunlight.
St. Lawrence’s Geology Department faculty take students out of their everyday dorm-gym-class world and bring them to the nature surrounding our campus. When winter locks down the Adirondacks, those adventures can’t happen as frequently. I imagine they must be looking forward to the end of winter more than most.
Even at the end of this winter-that-wasn’t, the North Country wouldn’t let us get away without gorgeous glaze ice and snow-packed roads. Is any day crisper than the one after an epic storm?
Decaseconds 