HDR Photography
Hayao Miyazaki’s films are notable for these beautiful landscape/establishing shots of windswept grassy hillsides beneath huge cumulus clouds. The gentle, rolling limestone hills of northern Kentucky, with some cows grazing quietly in the distance, made me feel like I was in a Miyazakiesque setting.
Given that most of my research is focused on renewable energy, I love to pick up relevant pictures to include in my presentations. This solar facility outside Denver, CO, was far larger than an initial glance at the image might imply. The tiny yellow dots at the base of the cylinders in the center of the image are enormous pieces of earthmoving equipment.
Albion College’s Equestrian Center sits on 340 acres near the outskirts of campus. In addition to fields and paddocks, the manor house of the land’s previous inhabitants sits on a nearby hill, overlooking the goings-on.
The facility has a lot of hay storage.
Inside the facility, the region’s Pony Clubs were holding a rally. This particular pony looks pretty surprised to be finding themselves in the wash stall.
The background of this image—fleets of golf carts, tons of bedding, parking lots of trucks and horse trailers, plus busy grooms and working students—is a good reminder of the effort that goes into the equestrian experience happening in the foreground.
A summer sunrise accompanies many breakfasts when horses are involved, but I have to admit that I prefer mine with less grass and more eggs.
Sharing a sunrise breakfast with ponies is an experience I highly recommend.
Even with advanced warning, I wasn’t really ready for the eerie gradients of cloudless central Oregon sunsets in the summer; they remind me of those rover-captured images of sunsets on Mars.
The enormous Margaux Farm seems, like some equestrian Jurassic Park, to stretch from one horizon to the other.
This week’s theme on Decaseconds is apparently athletic fields. In the suburban Chicago grid, little park oases like these are a delightful break from the monotony.
St. Lawrence’s athletic fields take on a particularly Scooby Doo glow when fog rolls in.
St. Lawrence University’s Saddlemire Trail (just to the right of the creek) runs through the wilder parts of our campus. A sunset stroll along it (and its twin, the Kip Trail) makes for a perfect early-June evening.
Battling the breezes of late summer above the fallow fields of the North Country, this image might appear to be capturing the edge of a farm. In fact, this is the southeastern reach of St. Lawrence University’s rural campus. The stables, home of our IHSA riding team, are off in the distance.
When foot upon foot of snow stacks up outside, looking back to pictures from springtime on St. Lawrence’s campus helps to remind me that this condition is not permanent.
St. Lawrence University is renovating its historic Apple Arena, home of the Skating Saints, and the project is entering its final phases. Back in May, however, the foundations were just being poured and the skeleton of the structure was laid bare. Can you spot the steeple of Gunnison Memorial Chapel on the horizon?
The huge expanses of space and the mixture of animals that might not be seen elsewhere make Kentucky Horse Park a sort of real world Jurassic Park (minus the dinosaur attacks).
Decaseconds 