HDR Photography
Rain at sunset leaves behind a Hartford looking exactly like I always hoped my city-home would. The smaller buildings in the foreground and the taller structures in the distance have a perfect coincidence to make layer after layer of space vanishing into the golden sky.
That light in the sky is some strange and eerie scattering during a storm over the city that brought to mind nothing more than the sorts of occult summonings found in films like “Ghostbusters” or “To Cast a Deadly Spell.” Perhaps I’ve been playing too much Deadlock lately.
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.
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.
From “open for business” to “sleeping on the dock,” Mohonk Mountain House’s boats present lovely repeating patterns.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After a nighttime poster session, crowds of chemists issued forth from the San Diego Convention Center and across the tracks to the Gaslamp Quarter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Decaseconds 