HDR Photography
Lampson Falls cuts through the woods where the St. Lawrence River Valley begins to transition into the Adirondacks. On this crisp fall afternoon, perfect weather accompanied the hikers exploring the groomed trails, campsites, and beach surrounding the falls.
Above a northern forest in the fall, the burst of foliage almost becomes an abstract explosion. Winding down on the forest floor is a neatly groomed path, adding just a tiny extra hint of possibility.
St. Lawrence University’s Sustainability Program hosted a Harvest Fest at their farm this weekend, and I was on hand with the drone to get images of the day. The farm in the distance will be the upcoming topic of the next few posts covering events of the day.
In the foreground, the Hoot Owl bar sits near Canton’s railroad tracks. Though it used to be the train station, it’s now one of the main student bars. I like to think of it as the guard house between town and the domain of the undergraduates.
Where sunset tapers into the rest of the sky—or when a sunset is so complete and overwhelming that the whole sky is transformed—there are interesting patterns to be found in the northwestern and southwestern edge. The evening of this image over Canton, New York, the result seemed particularly reminiscent of some Renaissance painting.
Though we may officially have a couple more weeks, summer has practically ended when schools resume. St. Lawrence University’s campus is buzzing with students and faculty at all hours of the day and night.
Now can we please be done with the summer weather? Bring on fall.
Summer in Kentucky is the stuff of country music songs and Hunter S. Thompson essays. This pair of images captures a Bourbon-y taste of that humid, breezy life.
The smooth, iterative patterns of rolling Utah hills are only occasionally interrupted by the cubic forms of little homesteads. I happened to be rolling down the Interstate at just the right moment to catch this house peaking out from the shadow of the nearby hill into the morning light.
I photographed the small clearings around homes in the hills of Park City, Utah, but that wasn’t the case for every structure. In this case, only the metal roof and chimney are visible above the pines. That’s a cozy contrast to the more populous valley in the background.
I finally finished processing the photographs of the transcontinental drive, transient spectroscopy, and Transamerica pyramid that made up my 2017 sabbatical from St. Lawrence University to Berkeley Lab for solar energy research. Check out my favorites, in handy chronological order, by clicking on the image of Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge below:
After a day of rain, the clouds peeled back around sunset to reveal the foothills of the Adirondacks to the south. This bucolic landscape (on the right side of the image) is actually the eastern reach of St. Lawrence University’s 1,000-acre campus.
Thick forests carpet the hills of Utah, except where they don’t. In many of those little clearings, a human-made structure is visible. The cabin in the foreground clearing looks particularly inviting.
Huge population growth in the American West led to a lot of new construction; I see the same thing in my remote area of Northern New York. Unlike up here, where storms and seasonal temperature cycles destroyed many of those structures after they were no longer useful, this partially inhabited area in Utah remains well-preserved.
The ancient lake bed that became the Bonneville Salt Flats refloods with water each winter—but just a few inches. As a result, raising these tracks even slightly above the bed is all that’s needed to protect them.
A curvature-of-the-Earth-matching flatness in across the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah makes the repeating geometry of human-made structures hypnotically visible.
Decaseconds 