A nearly winter morning marks the end of the semester. Light reflecting from the Connecticut River adds some energy to a monochromatic world and I head to work to submit final grades.
Pre-Sunrise Hartford
Tag: dawn
Vineyard in a Horseshoe
A whole vineyard is nestled into a horseshoe bend in the South Elkhorn Creek outside Midway, Kentucky.
Landscape Chunks, Textures, and Variations
The riotous multilayered landscapes of artists like Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck always fascinated me: how could so many different textures of farmland and hillside really coexist? Then I flew over Midway, Kentucky to see an array of fields that created exactly the same layer-upon-layer multitextured expanse.
Interstate Crosses South Elkhorn Creek
Morning light shines over Interstate 64 crossing South Elkhorn Creek in Midway, Kentucky.
Never So Glad to See Sunrise Over Spanish Mountains
After our redeye flight from Madrid to New York turned around halfway over the Atlantic due to mechanical issues, I’ve never been so happy to see sunrise on dry land.
Madrid Obligatorio
In December, our transatlantic flight to New York turning back near Greenland, spending hours in the air with an unknown mechanical error for returning us to the Madrid-Barajas Airport. After an all-too-brief but restless night in a mediocre Spanish hotel, we were back at the airport early the next morning for a second (and ultimately successful) attempt at an Atlantic crossing. Several hundred people waited to board. I looked out at the horizon; the landscape was strange, alien, surreal, but ultimately a lot more welcoming than the cold dark of the North Atlantic. The image will stay with me.
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.
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.)
Balcony View in the Morning
A great delight of moving to Hartford was finding myself with morning views that excite and motivate me. Even when the sky itself is flat, the fog in the valley provides a smoothly varying topography to contrast the angular structure of the skyline.
Connecticut’s Marine Layer
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.
Sun Peaks Around the Mountain
Though I missed it when I originally processed them, I was entertained to look back at this pair of shots from early spring in Salisbury, Connecticut—one pointing northeast and the other pointing southeast. The light of the rising sun is visible in the distance in both directions where the shadow of the mountain over town is absent.
Zenda Drive at Dawn
Though a photographer might briefly visit many locations, actually staying in a location means being present at the moment when the light is just right. In this case, sunrise pouring into Coachella Valley lights up the mountainsides and the rooftops, but not yet the valley floor itself.
Being there to capture the sunrise picture is great, of course, but being on location in this case also meant being able to follow it up with a sunrise dip in the hot tub.
Interruptions in the Coachella Valley Array
The dry seabed that is Coachella Valley provides a very flat surface for construction; as a result, modern constructions mostly fall on whatever pattern/array is convenient to the developers. In a few places, however, interruptions in those arrays stand out in an aerial view.
The palms on this golf course, for example, are on a clear grid, with the fairways and greens cut into it. Was this a palm plantation before the course was build?
Here, the green lawn of a larger home stands out, covering multiple grid positions, while neighboring homes cluster into smaller, more regularly arrayed lots.
Though this subdivision isn’t itself on a grid, the clubhouse nonetheless interrupts the pattern.
Time Series: Travelers Tower
The move to Hartford has offered me the opportunity to capture this time sequence (like the ones I took in Kentucky and the North Country) with a dramatic view of Travelers Tower over the course of a day. If the image appeals, it’s also available as a dynamic wallpaper for macOS that will change your desktop with the time of day.
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Los Angeles: A Blade Runner Morning
Though it may lack the verticality of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles in 2019, the cloudy skies and slightly sinister oranges put me in mind of the film’s iconic imagery.
Decaseconds 