HDR Photography
Though even April doesn’t guarantee and escape from blizzards in New England, I’m nonetheless cathartically purging myself of wintery aesthetics, like I.M. Pei’s Bushnell Tower standing proud at the edge of Hartford’s downtown.
Calder’s “Stegosaurus” is an enormous color outlier in the neutral snow color scheme of downtown Hartford.
Hartford’s Pratt Street is closed to automobile traffic, but a cold and windy afternoon left it largely quiet of all traffic.
As we reach the vernal equinox at the precise moment this post goes up, I’m taking a moment to reflect on the end of a long, cold winter in Hartford with some of the images I captured of the experience.
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.
A sudden morning snow storm followed by incongruously warm day led to an odd quick-melting layer of snow that fanned off of rooftops like the blast visible in the distance.
During the Northeast’s last great storm, I ventured out with my camera to document Hartford’s response and the stillness of the city beneath a layer of sound-absorbing snow.
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.
Big winter storms make for salty, chaotic snow piles alongside the symmetrical Neo-Gothic architecture of Hartford’s Trinity College.
Some subzero mornings make rising from the bed nonetheless worthwhile. Billowing clouds of water vapor converting quickly to ice crystals produced this entrancing pattern, in which the plumes shifted from being lighter than the sky to darker, depending on position and density.
This connecting courtyard between two Travelers buildings in Hartford has been blocked from foot traffic (I was shooting through a high fence), making it a strange forbidden liminal space. That the two buildings facing each other aren’t actually symmetrical—despite echoing one another—makes it feel like a sort of forbidden zone where reality has faulted somehow.
Photographing progress in the research lab can be so useful for answering that future question: “Did it really look like this last time we ran this experiment?” Our memories are imperfect, but so too is an image of a sample if one adjusts the processing settings to amplify saturation or contrast beyond reality. Sometimes, the goal of capturing something true to life overlaps with capturing something aesthetically pleasing, and then I have to share this image of freshly synthesized nanopowder clinging via static electricity to the end of a glass stirring rod.
Decaseconds 