Tag: Night

Three Scenes from the Dairy Princess Festival

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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.

Snack America

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.

But Dad!

And what kind of American festivities would be complete without some live music?

Elders with Music

Self Portrait 2014

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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.

Self Portrait 2014

Golden Gate and Bay in the Rain

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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.

Golden Gate and Bay in the Rain

The Spooky Wood

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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.

The Spooky Wood

Shattuck Rooftops

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Looking south, over the rooftops and streetlights of downtown Berkeley, the high-rise buildings of Oakland and Emeryville are luminescent ghosts in the bay fog. I’ve come back to this photograph again and again—the composition isn’t quite right, the quality is just average, but for some reason I find it inescapable. I can forgive all of its sins (and mine in taking it) for the trajectory of those sodium lamps, arcing gently to the south like some fairy worm.

Shattuck Rooftops

Chemistry in Action

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St. Lawrence University celebrated Parents’ Weekend on Saturday with a gorgeous fireworks display on the south side of campus. Conveniently, this is the sky above Johnson Hall of Science. The combination of architectural textures, floral fireworks patterns, and fall foliage make for an image that would be more at home in a video game than reality.

Chemistry in Action

Post-Ski: Read

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At the end of a long day on Oregon’s Mt. Hood, returning in the evening to Timberline Lodge and its gorgeous/unique internal geometry is at once (slightly) alienating and welcoming. This quiet reading corner meets all of my criteria: not far from a fireplace and with the perfect chairs for curling up with hot chocolate. The blue fabric of these chairs, and their combination of rustic wood and steel, put me in mind of the This End Up furniture of the 1980s. The childhood associations only make the place more mentally comfortable.

Post-Ski: Read

Luminous Science

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St. Lawrence University’s Johnson Hall of Science is a lovely, brand-new science building (particularly appreciated by chemists who prefer not to work in the miasma of their predecessors’ experiments.) The aesthetic benefits are supplemented by olfactory ones: in addition to excellent ventilation inside, the exterior of the building is surrounded by wild grasses and flowers that energize me the moment I step outside.

When viewed at night, the luminous quality of the glass facade lends the place a storybook look that I think HDR captures perfectly.

Luminous Science

Elven Kitchen

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In the sylvan core of UBC’s (aptly named) Green College, a few random buildings hide with the trees. Some have pedestrian uses (literally—the building on the right is a stairwell), but others are more surreal: this little cottage is a shared-use kitchen. As the first rays of moonlight catch the scene, I can’t help but be reminded of some Tolkienesque elven fortress.

Elven Kitchen

Pink Sky at Night…

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What is “honesty” in photography? My goal as a photographer is to capture what I saw—the subjective experience of being in a single moment. I want to capture a “truth.” The process of taking a picture is projecting the reality around us onto a sensor and through myriad digital processes to create the photograph you see in front of you now. Every photographer has, in their pursuit of truth in imaging, some lines in terms of image manipulation that they will and won’t cross. HDR, for instance, is viewed as a “cheat” by some, and as a better approach to getting the true dynamic range of the human eye by others.

A less dramatic case, however, is the use of color in an image. Last night, the sky over Canton was this incredible, surreal, and otherworldly pink-orange color that was completely overwhelming and astonishing. When I noticed it out the window, I sprinted outside with my camera and captured the final, fleeting moments. I was in that moment. Nearly the same effect, however, could have been achieved with a simply pink photo filter. To me, this raises two issues:

  1. Trust: You have to trust me, as the photographer, to portray the experience I was having when I captured the image.
  2. Subjective reality: When I process a photo, what techniques are enhancing my ability to convey my subjective experience to you? Which techniques are just “cheating?”

Pink Sky at Night...

Sugar Shack

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Granted, I don’t speak Portuguese—but if I studied the signs correctly, I believe this building is a recreation of the sort of shack used in converting sugar cane into raw sugar. From the outside, it has just the right Brazilian charm. From the inside, the dichotomy at the heart of modern Brazil is even better represented: traditional cane processing equipment, including massive grinding stones, spend time alongside comfortable couches and a television.

Sugar Shack

Snow Porch

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During the blazing August heat, looking back to winter pictures leads to the oddest “time machine effect.” As you can see from the rapidly filling tire tracks in the driveway, we barely made it home ahead of what turned out to be a fierce storm. The comfort of “I don’t have to go out there” is so amplified when standing on a perfect porch, next to the door to a cozy house, and seeing the frozen, dark contrast in the graveyard across the way.

Snow Porch