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.
Tag: Night
Night Snow Plow
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.
Mohonk Boats, Day and Night
From “open for business” to “sleeping on the dock,” Mohonk Mountain House’s boats present lovely repeating patterns.
Skating in the Park
Despite years of living across the street from this charming skating rink in Bushnell Park, I’ve somehow never managed to capture good images of the action before this year. With the light of the full moon in the background, Hartford residents queued up for a chance on the ice.
Impossible Chapel View
When showing this picture of Trinity College’s chapel and Long Walk to a fellow alum, his first question was, “Where did you go to take this?” A near-lifetime of seeing the same perspectives from the same high points on campus made a shot like this one a complete surprise—a reaction that I’m always happy to provide.
An Unusual Long Walk Perspective
The impossibility of this particular view of Trinity’s Long Walk keeps my eye returning to the perspective line as the building stretches away in the distance but doesn’t leave the frame.
The Night of (Probably) No Aurora
Strong CMEs arrived at Earth to find… cloud cover, at least over Hartford. I nonetheless flew my drone and I can almost convince myself that I see some green glow coming through the clouds amid the city lights scattering back.
Convention Crossing Crowd
After a nighttime poster session, crowds of chemists issued forth from the San Diego Convention Center and across the tracks to the Gaslamp Quarter.
A Porsche at the Long Walk
Quiet summer evenings along Trinity College’s Long Walk, so calm and dignified and neogothic, are best complemented by the shiny silver paint of a vintage Porsche 911.
Clement, Raether, and the Hartford Skyline
The warm sodium glow of Trinity College’s campus by night—Clement Chemistry Building and Raether Library in the foreground, the chapel and the Hartford skyline in the background—highlights (in a literal, X-marks-the-spot manner) the contrast between being a student and a faculty member here. Though the same institution, the same general campus, I spend my time now in completely different places than I once did. A prime example is the X-marked courtyard between the two buildings—a place I walked through perhaps 10 times total as a student, but where I now pause for coffee with my colleagues nearly every morning.
Core Campus on a Summer Night
Summer nights on Trinity College’s campus are quiet but the paths and buildings remain as effulgent as ever. There’s a luminous quality to this aerial view that really captures the sensory experience of exploring the quads by night.
Night Over Northern Connecticut
Rolling northern Connecticut hills hide the bright lights of the distant city just over the horizon, scattered from post-thunderstorm clouds once the sunlight vanishes.
Travelers Tower at Peak Batman
Neither the neoclassical architecture nor the rain make this a “peak Batman” image—rather, it’s the interplay of spotlights with fog that creates what I would describe as “Batmanitude”.
Simon Stålenhag Snack Bar
The retro-futurist art of Simon Stålenhag places intimate, perhaps even old-fashioned scenes in the foreground of images with strange, alien machines in the distance. A lone pair of nighttime snackers waiting at a slab-sided friterie trailer in the environs of the authentically 1950s Atomium represented such a real-world manifestation of the phenomenon that I had to stop and capture the scene.
The Atomium
The scale of Belgium’s Atomium seems to be poorly captured in pictures—perhaps because it’s difficult to capture the structure and its surroundings together, or perhaps because the 102-m-tall structure so resembles something we might be more comfortable seeing at 10 m scale. The shrinking lines of sculptural lampposts helps a bit, but it’s night that I believe truly fixes the scale issue. See the band of red in the topmost sphere? That band is the array of full-length windows of the restaurant at the top of the structure, and the red light is the lighting inside.
Decaseconds 