HDR Photography
The classic winter picture of clean, fresh snow and bright blue skies seems much easier to come by, ironically, under less-wintery conditions near the beginning or end of the season. Under the snow at the edge of the patch in the foreground, you can see that the grass is still green.
In addition to photography, I’ve been exploring 3D printing in the past few years. I’ve found that it’s a great route to making small objects to support my science work. In this case, I was developing a holder to support a 12.7 mm pressed solid sample pellet inside the space normally occupied by a 10-cm pathlength liquid-handling cuvette. The result is this odd rectangular shape that unlocks to hold the “too wide” pellet diagonally—thanks, square root of two!
In these forms, I was working with a variety of materials, including glass-reinforced nylon, lost-wax-cast brass, and a bronze/steel powder combination.
Warm weather is finally returning to the North Country, and “drone weather” with it.
There are plenty of historical reasons (including the original St. Lawrence University’s acquisition of the adjacent agricultural college), but the clustering of the school’s STEM-focused buildings on one side of campus—the arts/humanities at the other extreme and most of the social sciences in the middle—has resulted in a literal mapping of the academic spectrum onto physical space.
I hear that ponies can have a lot more attitude than horses, and that the amount of attitude can get larger as they get smaller. I don’t know if that’s true, but this particular small pony seemed to have attitude to spare.
When an afternoon of riding at Fox Rust has finished, it’s back to the barn (in the distance), accompanied by a barn cat escort.
Winter in the North Country grips the homes and streets of Canton, New York.
A friendly barn dog is ready to qualify in the running for title of Goodest Boy.
Days are getting longer and I know (in spite of temperatures below -10ºF) that summer will eventually return.
As I did in the past, I captured a time sequence of views of St. Lawrence University’s Payson and Piskor Halls (with the ultimate goal of making a dynamic desktop for macOS.) A steady tripod and a very large lens skirt made this possible.
I: Morning
II: Late Afternoon
III: Sunset
IV: Blue Hour
V: Night
VI: Dawn
One of my favorite shots of 2020 is this quadcopter-captured image of a thunderstorm on the horizon chasing the setting sun, with the village of Canton’s public works in the foreground.
Unlike the generally empty dorms of St. Lawrence over winter break, Sykes is home to many of our international students who remain on campus. The traditional architecture seems natural under a crust of ice, with a sort of “Harry Potter staying at Hogwarts” vibe.
Though St. Lawrence’s students are arriving to campus in a safety-mandated trickle over the next few weeks instead of a single-day flood, there’s still a sense of the snow-blanketed halls coming back to life. I love the energy of a college campus in full swing.
Citizens of the North Country spent much of their spring quarantines in the woods; the campfire smoke from just beyond Lampson Falls attests to the family spending the night below.
The apparently slow and placid water above Lampson Falls seems out of character with the dramatic torrent downstream.
Decaseconds 