HDR Photography
For the past decade (nearly, anyway), I’ve been bringing you pictures from St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. With my move to Trinity, I’m running through my final stock of my favorite images. I suspect these will be the last images of St. Lawrence I post (no promises), so it seems fitting that they capture the campus at its most St.-Lawrence-y: crisp autumn evening, foliage lit up by campus fixtures, with a big North Country sunset on the horizon.
Light trails from (a) vehicles leaving a concert at Equus Run Vineyards and (b) cruising along the nearby highway might imply some connection between the two, but years of renting the summer cottage at the left side of this picture has taught us the truth: it’s a surprisingly long drive down back-country roads to reach that interstate.
Interstates may seem a natural part of the American landscape, but the drone’s-eye view reveals the truth of how highways were laid atop the earlier landscape. I like the convergence of the headlights along both the country road and I-64, like two different eras running to a shared future.
Last Wednesday, I showed you the light trails of concertgoers leaving Equus Run Vineyards. Today, I bring you a bird’s eye view of the same moments. In the distance, Margaux is quiet for the evening; in the midground, car headlights bounce off the grapes; in the foreground, light trails highlight the bridge and the road through the trees.
These bright oranges around the quad last fall marked the formal inauguration of St. Lawrence’s latest president, Kathryn A. Morris.
Colton, New York’s hydroelectric dam brings together dark, deep, deceptively passive water on one side and a raging torrent on the other. It’s perhaps a useful metaphor for the experience of preparing to leave a place one has lived for a decade. Visiting sites like this is also a reminder that sometimes I avoid exploring the interesting places near me until I’m preparing to leave the area; something analogous happened near the end of my sabbatical.
Smooth, gentle, green hills cover layers of limestone beneath; trees mark the grooves where creeks cut through the soft stone.
“Too many” may be an exaggeration, but a field full of ponies on a Kentucky evening sure feels like it’s pushing the limit.
While the Interstate system feels like an ingrained part of American culture at this point, its presence (in the Eastern U.S., anyway) is revealed as a late addition from a drone’s eye view: the original patterns of farms and country roads has this massive strip of highway laid atop it.
Drones open up all kinds of new perspectives, but these vantages don’t always have to be extreme or dramatic. The equivalent height of an aerial work platform presents just the correct geometry to get these rays from the setting sun to explode from the roof of a recently renovated barn outside Lexington, Kentucky.
Bridges between counties in the approximately southern United States mostly remind me of Smokey and the Bandit, but this one between Woodford and Scott counties in Kentucky differs both in that (1) it’s not currently out, necessitating a dramatic jump, and (2) it’s experiencing a far more peaceful evening.
Mountains and hillsides in Coachella Valley are a rocky, scrubby desert so long as they stay sufficiently sloped; the moment they reach the flat ex-lake valley floor, the housing developments begin.
The path at right is a fairly treacherous, dusty way up to the top of this hill; it’s the one I took last year to capture images like this one. Flying to the top with my drone is, by comparison, a bit less strenuous.
Summer dawns are calm, gentle times in Midway, Kentucky—and when we’re in town for horse shows, you can bet we see a lot of them. I find it satisfying that the aerial view is just as relaxing and bucolic.
Our summer rental cottage in rural(ish) Kentucky provides my wife’s favorite benefit: waking up to horses in the back yard. There’s no better coffee companion than an equine friend.
Decaseconds 