HDR Photography
We returned to Connecticut just in time for a display of peak Southern-New-England springtime perfection; though the photographs from our trip through the Mediterranean will return soon, I couldn’t help but share our charming local neighborhood.
Leaves are long gone, buds have yet to quite emerge, and the colorful display from my earlier picture down Summit Street exists only in that photograph.
The Wadsworth and Travelers Tower frame Bushnell Tower, the State Capitol, and Bushnell Park, for a lovely postcard image of Hartford, Connecticut.
Looking back through years of photographs, I find that my late-winter/early-spring seasonal photos are nearly empty. The bland pre-bloom colors have a lot to do with that, so I thought I would lean into it with a B&W approach that says, “You didn’t want to see the colors, anyway.”
The elegant State Capitol of Connecticut is on a hill above downtown Hartford—the same hill once occupied by the school that would become Trinity College.
Dawn light illuminates the old Indio, California—a farming city of date plantations and strange water projects. In the distance, the oncoming scourge of sprawling subdivisions may signal the end of this particular era.
Cool Rayleigh-scattered blue light, warm also-Rayleigh-scattered sunset light, clean white LEDs reflecting off of snow, deep orange sodium lights—there’s every option visible from above Trinity College’s campus.
Like most infrastructure, a roof is something one generally ignores so long as it is functioning as expected. A heavy melt of snow, however, might call all of that into question. At least the view is good from up here.
I’ve long been drawn to images where I could capture nature and dense urban settings in close proximity. Perhaps it’s the utopian feel of those images—if a lot of people want to live in harmony with nature, we need to pack ourselves into dense structures to do so. Does that make this just a little solarpunk?
A terrifying cloud (I swear, it makes sense) is the antagonist of “Nope,” and I saw echoes of that shape in this cloud above the San Jacinto Mountains and the Empire Polo Club.
Snow and scaffolding are each the kind of dramatic additions to a neo-gothic building that suggest the dramatic climax of a noir film will take place on its rooftop.
White covers Trinity’s campus and accents the Neo-Gothic architecture, but the modernist skyline of Hartford in the distance perpetually suggests what else might architecturally be. Though I love twentieth century architecture, there’s little argument that it would have been the wrong choice for a small liberal arts college. It wasn’t until recently that I came to realize that many of these old-looking buildings are less than 100 years old; in essence, they were built to be old-fashioned from the start. Most east-coast schools are a sort of academic Disneyland—one constructed long enough ago that we forgot about the artifice and now see only authenticity.
The secretive and elite (and currently-on-probation) St. Anthony’s Hall looks dignified and quiet beneath a layer of snow.
Though the tiny lights of the Coachella Valley set the scale for the mighty size of the San Jacinto Mountains, even that range is dwarfed by the mighty scope and expanse of the sunset.
The newly renovated pond in Bushnell Park had crisp, clear water this fall and I assumed that I’d lose sight of the rocks at the bottom from the build-up of fallen leaves. Instead, it turns out that a frozen surface was the bottom-obscuring victor.
Decaseconds 