HDR Photography
Despite any efforts to the contrary, nostalgia sneaks into my life at moments I least expect. Trinity’s Long Walk was my undergraduate home for several years and this particular moment—a winter evening, as the sun goes down and the smell of dinner cooking in the dining hall climbs aboard the surprisingly warm breeze—was so evocative of the experiences that made me fall in love with campus 20 years ago.
Trinity College’s chapel is a beautiful piece of twentieth-century neo-Gothic architecture, but the interaction with the sunset sky brought a whole new appreciation for the structure. The gold light of the sky comes through the open belfry, but electrical lighting elements that shine up the structure from beneath the belfry happened to also match the sunset color and the position along the horizon, producing the odd trompe l’oeil of the structure appearing to allow the viewer to see through the mountains in the distance to even more sky beyond.
Bushnell tower sits at one edge of the cluster of tall buildings that is Hartford’s downtown. It was originally meant to be accompanied by a partner adjacent to it that was never constructed—so instead, we get a view of the State Capitol.
Neither the neoclassical architecture nor the rain make this a “peak Batman” image—rather, it’s the interplay of spotlights with fog that creates what I would describe as “Batmanitude”.
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.
Race-prepped cars are famously inconvenient modes of transportation, but when you need to get somewhere (with a folding chair) quickly, hanging from the door has a certain practicality.
I previously captured this camera car preparing for the action, but seeing it trailing a drifting Mustang in its very forward-facing grip-driving mode makes for an effective demonstration of the differences between the driving styles.
Trinity College’s chapter of St. Anthony Hall (a.k.a. “The Hall) may currently be closed, but a coating of snow still leaves it looking festive.
The great glowing verticality of Bushnell Tower at night reveals the strengths in I.M. Pei’s original design.
A big, dramatic golden dome really stands out against a sky of dramatic Rayleigh-scattering-blue clouds, but views of the Connecticut State Capitol always leave me wondering what-ifs… This was the original site of Trinity College, which relocated to make way for this current structure. How would this high point in Hartford appear with Trinity here instead?
A fog of Macbeth/Shakespeare/Weird-Sisters-level strangeness descended on Hartford last night.
A black Nissan raising a huge cloud of white tire dust is already 80% of the way to being in black and white, so I finished the job.
A pack of Japanese sports cars going sideways in a haze of tire smoke should best be described as “driftacular”.
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.)
Decaseconds 