Snowy Clement and Hartford

White covers Trinity’s campus and accents the Neo-Gothic architecture, but the modernist skyline of Hartford in the distance perpetually suggests what else might architecturally be. Though I love twentieth century architecture, there’s little argument that it would have been the wrong choice for a small liberal arts college. It wasn’t until recently that I came to realize that many of these old-looking buildings are less than 100 years old; in essence, they were built to be old-fashioned from the start. Most east-coast schools are a sort of academic Disneyland—one constructed long enough ago that we forgot about the artifice and now see only authenticity.

Snowy Clement and Hartford

Blissful Park Afternoon

There’s an excellent playground in Hartford’s Bushnell Park. Its large jungle gym, visible with its bright yellow and white upper structure in the foreground, is a miniature model of the State Capitol, found on the other side of the park.

Blissful Park Afternoon

LSC and Hartford

With Hartford’s skyline looking on in the background, the brutalist facade of Trinity College’s LSC matches the carefully graded dirt of its adjacent quad before a thick layer of new sod was applied.

LSC and Hartford

Cold Dawn Nucleation

There’s some sang about the photographer, not the camera, mattering to a great shot; while I appreciate the value of having the right tools, this sunrise image captured in a quick moment with my phone on a 1ºF morning provides some evidence to support the theory. The low temperatures quickly nucleated ice crystals from towers across the city and produced this dramatic array of miniature clouds.

Cold Dawn Nucleation

Exam Dawn

Waking pre-dawn to be sure an NSF Major Research Instrumentation grant and a Statistical Mechanics exam are both finished when they need to be turns out to have some upsides—namely, this gigantic panorama of an incredible Hartford dawn. (This one is definitely worth clicking through to Flickr and further clicking to zoom to 100% scale.)

Exam Dawn