HDR Photography
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.)
Low clouds over the Connecticut River add extra autumn crisp to the day.
Halloween season brings the most New-England-y aesthetics to New England, and nowhere more than in a city park. The foliage adds a perfect contrast to blue-hour colors, and the park lights (as in the foreground) highlight the evening walkers.
I recently moved into a new office with a huge, boring, blank wall totally ready for a huge, interesting, dramatic landscape. That naturally meant returning to one of my favorite land/cityscapes, this view of Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Marin from sabbatical in 2017. For an image I expect to stare at for years to come, I really pulled out the stops in terms of producing the best possible image. Click through to Flickr to zoom in and get all of the details!
This is a sight I haven’t seen since I lived in the Bay Area: a layer of low-lying clouds caused by a temperature inversion that look remarkably like the marine layer. Though I know the origins aren’t the same in the Central Valley of Connecticut, that mix of perfectly clear sky and rolling clouds brought me back in time and made rising at dawn worth it.
I was semi-impressed to see the pigeons waiting patiently far away from this lunch-enjoyer in Amsterdam, but then I saw the green writing as his feet. While I’m sure that simple graffiti or utility markings are the true meaning of the lines, I like to imagine instead that they represent some kind of arcane invocation that protects his sandwich from avian interference.
The streets outside The Bushnell are a lot quieter and emptier on summer evenings when no show is happening, but the few automobiles present still provide a sense of scale to its dramatic structure.
We’ve now long passed the one-year anniversary of my move to Hartford, Connecticut. The benefit of occupying the same post downtown for all of that time is being present for those singular perfect nights with incredible post-storm skies.
The highest hill in Hartford is the site of the State Capitol… in 2024. But before being relocated, this was once the home of Trinity College.
A weekend of terrifying phone-buzzes presaging possible tornadoes provided two positive outcomes come Sunday evening: (1) no tornadoes (more importantly) and (2) an incredible, dramatic sunset sky over Hartford.
Summer has arrived and layer upon layer of Bushnell Park is lush and currently under enjoyment by Hartford’s residents and guests.
I’ve long been interested in visualizing gradients between different levels of density in housing and construction; here in Hartford, Bushnell Tower is the sort of final edge point between the tall structures of downtown and the medium-rise buildings in the rest of the city. Bushnell Park in the foreground acts as a counterpoint to both.
Hartford’s Frog Hollow neighborhood is home to Broad Street, seen at the left side of this image. Just beyond its bounds is downtown Hartford. Until flying my drone, I had never seen the two in contrast like this. They make quite a pair.
Even in a classic tourist town like Kilkenny, the stone walls and churches are accompanied by the features of modern Ireland. The auto mechanic and filling station in the left foreground (not to mention the cars) provide little hints of the century when this image was captured.
Snow days are rare for adults—but when a nor’easter completely fuses Hartford in place, there’s not much else to do but ride it out. The resulting images were cold but cozy—ready to go with a warm beverage and a good book.
Decaseconds 