HDR Photography
Monday’s post brought me back to the epic imagery of the Bay Area that I suspect I took a bit for granted back when we were starting Decaseconds in 2011. Convincing oneself that one is a photographer is easy when these are the views—but I’m glad I had the potency of these places to get me through those awkward early years of developing as a photographer.*
*Apologies for the wordplay.
A weird spate of “Bay Area weather”—cloudy and rainy in the morning, bright and sunny in the afternoon, chilly but not cold—has brought moments like these, picnicking on the grounds of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, back to my mind.
Air-free chemical processes require specialized apparatus like the glass Schlenk line inside this dramatically lit fume hood.
Though even April doesn’t guarantee and escape from blizzards in New England, I’m nonetheless cathartically purging myself of wintery aesthetics, like I.M. Pei’s Bushnell Tower standing proud at the edge of Hartford’s downtown.
This barn cat at the Ethel Walker School’s stable really has no time for my shenanigans.
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.
Looking back through years of photographs, I find that my late-winter/early-spring seasonal photos are nearly empty. The bland pre-bloom colors have a lot to do with that, so I thought I would lean into it with a B&W approach that says, “You didn’t want to see the colors, anyway.”
Though the winter oak savanna of Fullersburg Woods is a busy mess of trees, grass, and snow, the horizontal Rayleigh-scattering-blue shadows of the riverbanks add large-scale structure to the landscape.
A sudden morning snow storm followed by incongruously warm day led to an odd quick-melting layer of snow that fanned off of rooftops like the blast visible in the distance.
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.
Winter rain in Coachella Valley brings deep, somber hues to the monoculture arrays of date palms. I usually aim for depth and variety in my images, with a sense of definite space, so it’s an engaging game to depart from that and focus on a single plane and hypnotic pattern.
Big winter storms make for salty, chaotic snow piles alongside the symmetrical Neo-Gothic architecture of Hartford’s Trinity College.
From “open for business” to “sleeping on the dock,” Mohonk Mountain House’s boats present lovely repeating patterns.
As summer jobs go, lifeguarding on Lake Mohonk seems like a pretty good one.
Some subzero mornings make rising from the bed nonetheless worthwhile. Billowing clouds of water vapor converting quickly to ice crystals produced this entrancing pattern, in which the plumes shifted from being lighter than the sky to darker, depending on position and density.
Decaseconds 