HDR Photography
I’ve been on a serious St. Lawrence-in-the-snow photography kick lately, but pictures like this shot of Kirk Douglas Hall (the campus’s newest dorm) really justify the trend. Framed by trees and isolated in the snow, the idyllic nature of the place is enhanced.
No cropping, no HDR, and only minimal post-processing were applied to this image. Wandering in a snowstorm with a prime lens felt, well, primal, and I wanted an image that captured that. I know that there’s no such thing as the “true” photograph of a place or a moment, but at the edge of St. Lawrence’s campus, at this particular blue hour, the magic needed no adulteration.
This is the kind of image that I look back on the most: the ones with the strongest sense of place, the most obvious path to escape into the image. As we start a new year, I’d like to think that it’s a mark of my increased confidence as a photographer that I can make more with less. (Though don’t get me wrong—there are times when I’m glad to be able to make something out of nothing.)
Pardon my sappy cliché for the moment: a brand new year and a perfect, untouched field with interesting features in the distance. Here we go!
Today is New Year’s Eve: out with the old, in with the new, etc. Time doesn’t seem to pass in Florida, however—it’s a place that’s always at the dawn of history, the muggy primordial swamp, with the monolith and the howling primates just outside the frame.
When I travel from the wintery expanse of the North Country to Florida, nothing feels real. Am I in some humid almost-heaven of trees and life and ponies? The massive sun halo doesn’t hurt the effect—that’s for sure.
One of my favorite times (of the entire year) for photography is after Christmas dinner. Life is slow and sedate, and it matched the placid(ish) rolls of the Gulf of Mexico perfectly. Even the shapes of people are soft and indistinct—an impressionist’s idea of a family playing in the waves. Spending the holidays in Florida has a certain appeal.
When the weather outside is frightful, go to Florida! With sunrises like this to greet me, I might never leave.
There is something enormously satisfying about the moments when a great shot comes directly to me—no setup, no searching, no prep. I looked outside, the scene was beautiful, and all I had to do was compose and shoot. The “easy” feelings keep coming in Florida: I don’t have to shovel any snow, either.
Late fall doesn’t mean rich, verdant scenes or flame-colored leaves. In the North Country, late fall really means early winter. The fields are brown, the trees are bare, and the scene is dusted with snow. Other than the greens of the pines, the world hibernates. The birds scattering to the air are the only signs of life, but the scene has a sort of cliché, stark beauty.
Rose gardens are more frequently Brendan’s purview on this blog (check out this post, or this one), but my visit to Portland, Oregon this summer gave me the chance to shoot some rose gardens of my own. The dramatic sky, the far-off pavilion, the spouting fountain, the acres of roses, and the mis-matched ramp and stairs at the edges of the picture: Peninsula Park Rose Garden hits all the right fairy tale notes. I was lucky to be able to capture it at just the right heavy summer moment—though I have to wonder how it would look in the fuzzy first moments of sunrise, too.
My trip to Chicagoland meant a pilgrimage to Stonewall Farm in Ixonia, Wisconsin, where the ponies had shaggy winter coats that matched the landscape perfectly.
Having spent almost the entire fall in the St. Lawrence County, having the opportunity to travel and change my scenery is welcome. Even as I contemplate the Chicago skyline, the North Country says goodbye with this pastoral sunrise
For Halloween, what better scary and spooky sight than an abandoned farm? The creepier part comes in the origin of this particular farm: this is part of the abandoned set of “I Dreamed of Africa” in Zulu-Nyala near Hluhluwe, South Africa. So this is an abandoned, decaying facsimile of someone’s imagined African paradise. Eerie!
Nostalgia views the world from a distance but with specific acuity. A view from Grizzly Peak of the Berkeley Marina might look like a warm, buzzy vision of NorCal, but with my own memories I attribute specific instances and moments to every aspect of the landscape: Kites flying over Caesar Chavez Park. Stories of a ferry to San Francisco that once ran from the decaying jetty. Learning to sail on the tiny boats on the “left” side of the peninsula. Sailing from the Marina to Angel Island, crewing a professor’s 40-foot sailboat. Finding a place to live, driving up and down University Ave. from the hotel to the hills. Crossing the highway on the bicycle bridge for a long, flat, sunny ride along the shore. All of that experience is encoded into the image, but I’ll always be the only person with the key to decrypt it.
When red leaves are backlit, they seem to glow so unbelievably. HDR photography can turn this setting from charming to almost overwhelming.
Departing JFK International Airport over Jamaica Bay, with the Manhattan skyline glittering in the sunrise, brings to mind my favorite topic: the gradient between dense urbanization and “wilderness.” If there’s a consistent theme to my photography, it’s the desire to capture this gradient in a single image (as I sometimes have in other settings.) Even my wide angle lens couldn’t capture the whole scene, but here’s One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building alongside the wetlands of Jamaica Bay, with New Jersey and Brooklyn buffering and smoothing the divide to a gradient.
Decaseconds 