HDR Photography
In the past, I’ve documented the slightly sinister feel of Canton at its most David-Lynchian. Here again, the lights of Main Street are friendly and inviting, but with that edge that small towns have. I can’t wait to see it carpeted in snow—the ambience changes again.
Having read about the Brenzier Method of producing wide-angle photos with intense bokeh, I thought I’d give it a try. I’m not totally happy with this image of the grass shifting in the rain outside my building, but it’s exciting to try new things and aim towards new possibilities. In the mean time, I think this image nicely captures the strange, silhouetted glow of being outside a busy building at night.
Today’s photograph is from two years ago, and what was once my mundane walk home has now become a totally alien scene of science fiction flora and architecture. The overwhelming light of the windows and the sharp geometries imposed by noise reduction algorithms really add to the effect.
The last supermoon of the summer (such as it is) was hovering over the Adirondacks and over St. Lawrence’s sylvan campus. The interplay with the science buildings seemed appropriate.
Even better, though, was the alignment of the moon directly over the tiny tower in the Adirondacks (cell, I’m guessing?). Maybe it’s innocuous, or maybe it’s part of a plan by a mad scientist to finally control the Moon!
St. Lawrence is an amazing place to spend time in mid-September: the lushness of summer is just barely beginning to crisp into fall, an autumn chill creeps into the evening air, and students (and faculty) have settled into the rhythms of another year.
Bleary-eyed, through a wide-open aperture with the last hints of sun and the now-dominant neon signage as its only lighting, I present to you: the Hoot Owl Express. This is (for the moment) St. Lawrence’s main “student bar,” its walls covered in old hockey jerseys and its staff preternaturally capable of spotting a fake I.D.
“Lights so bright they turn night into day!” Vernon Street, home of the Greek organizations of Trinity College, is a place where the time and the activities rarely seem correlated. On a night during the summer, however, the world was quiet and empty.
Summer means ice cream! There’s no more fitting place for a crowd to be during the Dairy Princess Festival than crowded around the local ice cream stand. The contrast is strong and the setting is familiar in that “classic Americana” kind of way. Even the edge of the house next door adds that bit of small-town welcoming spirit. A scene of Norman-Rockwell-esque friendliness.
Today, I’ll follow up Monday’s “Three Scenes” with two of the cool cars/trucks/auto-vehicles from the Dairy Princess Festival last weekend. Seeing strange and special cars in a land of brĂĽtal road salt is a testament to their owners care and attention.
I shot these images free-hand, outside, after 9:00 PM. That’s a testament of its own—either to the power of a fast prime lens and good noise reduction software, or to how late it stays light in the summer when you live this far north.
This weekend marked the crowning of a new Dairy Princess in Canton, New York, and with that crowning came a variety of festivities. A location scout for a charming movie about a small-town baseball team with moxie would have been hard-pressed to find a better vision of classic America. While eating an ice cream cone taller than my head and avoiding children running at full tilt, I had a chance to put my 35 mm prime lens to good use. I present three of my shots from the evening.
Ubiquitous food stands offer what you’re craving—as long as that includes sugar, salt, grease, potatoes, and caffeine.
There were also, of course, the quiet asides between family members in quasi-privacy. I really liked the way that this side-conversation was also physically away from the lights (and crowds), even if it did push my poor APS-C sensor to its limits.
And what kind of American festivities would be complete without some live music?
I often find myself using a timer in place of a cable release to remove camera shake on long-exposure shots—why not use that time for a bit of a “landscape self-portrait,” too? At the end of a long winter, in the dark of night, when it seemed that cold and precipitation dominate forever, my own presence in the environment and in reality is ghostly and insubstantial.
I sometimes sift through the RAW files I took long in the past, searching for meaning in images I captured long ago. In the case of this particular photograph, there’s more to the image than just my favorite Bay Area gradient of differing environments (e.g. Oakland and San Francisco and Alcatraz and two different enormous bridges and so on): there’s also a feeling of place and moment. The dramatic clouds and the grasses and the hint of the Golden Gate’s span are all spectacular, but the optics of a raindrop spattered across the lens add just as much to the image. You can practically smell the petrichor in the air.
Blasting along the highway in an automotive capsule, awash in a rainy night of bokeh and wiper-blade motion. The glow of the dials and readouts and knobs and LCD panels and LED chargers just barely grace the driver’s arms and frame the hypnotic scene.
When my brother was in kindergarten, he made his fort in a small section of densely wooded area on our property. He called it, as any five-year-old would, “The Spooky Wood.” When the leaves fell, it lived up to its name. The tangle of fallen limbs and scarred trunks was impenetrable to all but him; he know the way through the cellulosic maze. Finding this mysterious shed with its epic light amid a North Country tangle, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my brother’s long-abandoned hideout.
Another Saturday special: I took this image of a quiet bridge over the Grasser River (on the over-named Miner Street Road) tonight. This is far too much beautiful winter scenery for mid-March.
Decaseconds 