HDR Photography
When the time came to make the really big prints in Prof. Melissa Schulenberg’s Advanced Printmaking course at St. Lawrence University, only a steam roller had significant- and even-enough pressure to produce the best result. The breezy afternoon, the green foliage, and the bright yellow steam roller on a placid college campus makes for one serious juxtaposition in the middle of winter.
St. Lawrence University’s Enchanted Forest has a tree planted by each graduating class (though they’ve run out of space!), and amongst the bright yellow leaves and the gnarled bark is Herring-Cole Hall (they say it’s haunted!). The narrow depth of field (I was photographing a wedding!) completes the 3-D feel of standing between the trees.
Procrastinating a proposal is a great time for a quick drone flight. Though the camera quality is still around “potato,” the sight of St. Lawrence’s campus as autumn colors seep in, with foothills in the background, was too good to pass up.
If you’d like to watch the full flight (complete with overly trippy guitar music in place of screaming drone prop noise), I uploaded it to YouTube. The need for a gimbal on the camera is evident.
This photograph of the newly restored steeple of St. Lawrence’s Gunnison Chapel captures the Lazarus effect of seeing it return. I swung the camera to the setting sun, and I really like the way it cast a range of hues and structures over the image.
This weekend’s inescapable event was the once-in-a-decade super blood moon, a simultaneous lunar eclipse and supermoon. I snuck away from working to get a shot of the moonrise over the campus and the Adirondacks.
Later in the evening, the lunar eclipse was in full swing and I shot it as it passed the newly restored steeple of the campus chapel.
Burning steel wool makes for some really cool effects. With St. Lawrence University Photo Club, we experimented with illusions of depth and movement over the course of the exposure.
This image from inside Herring-Cole Hall at St. Lawrence University reminds me of the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey: All bright white surfaces and traditional motifs, but with a shape, geometry, and brightness that doesn’t seem quite of this Earth.
The view from atop Berkeley’s Campanile is a nostalgic one, with San Francisco and Oakland popping up in the distance above the sprawl. Walking along those broad, slightly cracked, and sun-baked pathways of Berkeley’s campus never quite felt natural, though. Can a place magnified beyond human scale feel that way?
The new steeple on Gunnison Memorial Chapel is installed (remember when it arrived?) and beginning to react with the atmosphere around it. This chemistry, in which copper metal transfers electrons to non-metal atoms from the air to become an ion, is called “reduction-oxidation” chemistry—abbreviated “redox.” Seeing this reaction happen on such a large scale, and produce such an awesome array of colors, is a treat.
Information cannot move through the universe (as far as we know) any faster than the speed of light. In the hyperbolically shaped world of spacetime, all factors that could influence my current state are in the “light cone” behind me, and all factors that I can influence in the future are in the “light cone” ahead of me. This photograph, from during a particularly nasty winter storm, exhibits light cones of another variety.
As part of my continuing series documenting the end of the school year on St. Lawrence’s campus, this image was taken on the same night as this one, just before the addition of the renovated steeple to Gunnison Memorial Chapel. As students say their goodbyes and party their way out of the college lifestyle, the campus is also being polished and prepared for commencement.
Continuing my observations of the end of the year are a couple of photographs of campus buildings that have a bit of literal spirit to them. First is Sykes Hall, one of the older dorms. With the full moon by the tower and the HDR’ed light trails (a happy accident), the scene says “Halloween in May.”
ODY Library doesn’t have the same old-school creepiness, but rather that brutalist, Soviet vibe that says the ghosts must be a bit more modern.
Continuing this week of “end of the school year,” calming-of-the-campus photographs is this landscape over the quad: An ocean of light and shadow (pardon the cliché) divides the new Kirk Douglass Hall (a.k.a. “the new dorm”) from the rememberer.
The end of the school year has finally arrived (I’m proctoring a final as we speak), and that leads to a lot of complicated emotions for graduating seniors: relief, regret, nostalgia, hope, etc. In a disused utility stairwell between a loading dock and a backstage prep area, I found this charming little shrine/still life. In the context of the space and the moment, I can’t begin to imagine what kind of meaning this structure contains. There’s a lovely symmetry though, isn’t there?
The last golden photons, their combination of diffuse and specular reflections bouncing from the windows of Trinity College’s Long Walk, are the perfect additions to the final moments of a crisp winter afternoon. This photo captures only a small section of the full stretch of Long Walk, which I still find rather astonishing.
Decaseconds 