HDR Photography
Coming to St. Lawrence, I was not prepared for the amount of forest space on the school’s 1000-acre campus. Flying above the Grasse River, campus looks wild and vaguely Nordic. I’ve never run into a frost giant on the way to work, but now I’m sort of wondering whether I need to prepare for that, too.
The roars and gasps of the crowd could be heard all over town: Friday night football in the North Country of New York. St. Lawrence’s Saints dominated Morrisville to the tune of 28–0. From quadcopter, the action on the field is just a bit out of range. One of the recurring themes of my work is the civilization gradient between densely human areas and wilderness; I view this picture as another interpretation of that theme. There’s perhaps no urban center in Canton, but there are quaint homes and university buildings giving way to farmland and, eventually, the foothills of the Adirondacks in the distance where the Earth begins to curve.
Night-flying for long-exposure photography seems to rely a lot on luck: How’s the wind? How’s the weather? That’s a lot to consider, but the superhuman perspective (even if it is occasionally a bit blurry) is worth it. I love the times of day when the brightness of building lights and the brightness of the setting sun match each other in intensity.
After playing at low altitudes, I upgraded to a DJI Phantom 3 Advanced last week. This quadcopter can stay stationary in the night sky—like, “long exposures look good” stationary. I’m looking forward to exploring what the little flying robot can do.
Having lived in dorms with entrances under archways myself, I’ve always found them friendly and inviting places. Perhaps that effect stems from the Batcave effect of having a “secret” entrance in a cave-like stone structure. Good place to store the batmobile.
“Cabin” is more an aesthetic style than a humble building in the North Country. At St. Lawrence’s Camp Canaras, the cabins are large structures with complicated architectural flourishes; at midnight, they take on a Tolkeinesque vibe.
There are a lot of small, rural towns with the odd culture bloom of colleges planted in their cores. I think it’s the ancillary buildings, the old fraternities and club houses with their mix of higher grandeur and shabbier paint, that most signal one of these villages
That extra school year energy of students wandering the campus at all hours provides an extra energy to a sleepy place. I miss it in the summer.
Traveling back to California for the first time since I left in 2013, I realized I had forgotten the little but important differences: the streets are crowded with cars instead of trucks and the air is saturated with a different set of volatile organic compounds.
From another perspective and at another time, this photograph captures the same Omni hotel and Petco Park from one of my earliest Decaseconds posts, almost four years ago. How odd to be back again.
St. Lawrence’s Geology Department faculty take students out of their everyday dorm-gym-class world and bring them to the nature surrounding our campus. When winter locks down the Adirondacks, those adventures can’t happen as frequently. I imagine they must be looking forward to the end of winter more than most.
I’ve continued experimenting with Aurora HDR software, and I’ve confirmed my earlier opinion that it is an excellent tool for surreal, enticing night shots and cases where the noise would be too high for any other HDR technique. For realistic HDR with natural lighting, however, Photomatix remains the king.
Real winter arrived with a horrible stillness. When the temperature is -25ºF, nothing moves and nothing melts and every bit of solid water stays just where you leave it. Even the tiny twigs and branches were stuck in its embrace.
I wanted to look back briefly on the structures of St. Lawrence University’s campus under lockdown from heavy snow. The oldest buildings, like Herring-Cole Hall, are naturals.
This little shed is in odd scale with the buildings around it, but its little puddle of light fits perfectly with the evening.
I’ve always grown to love the mid-twentieth-century buildings like the ODY Library. The lights, snow, and scaffolding among the trees put me in mind of Soviet science fiction.
Here is another example from around the same time period, Bewkes Science Hall. In my mind, authors of speculative fiction must be hiding behind the drawn blinds and imagining snowy, cyberpunk futures of the late 1990s.
Stark winter nights, the kind with a handful of clouds and a lot of bright stars, seem to be when I spend the most time shoveling my driveway. Might as well do a long exposure or two while I work, right? I particularly like the tree in the center of the image that has been completely lit by the adjacent streetlight: it seems otherworldly and special when compared to the other silhouetted trees.
It was a little cold outside, but the holiday lighted fountain show at Longwood Gardens was worth standing around in it.
Snow was falling last night. The small houses with highly peaked roofs and additions out back are a characteristic of this part of town, where the mill workers once lived. The wood sheds are another notable characteristic of an area where many people use only wood stoves to heat their homes in the winter.
I can’t wait until next Christmas!
Decaseconds 