Winter’s lockdown continues (it might warm up above -10ºF today!), but spring will eventually return. The footbridge to SUNY Canton will eventually be free of ice and the smallest hints of leaves will peak out from the tree branches.
Tag: photography
Last Light Before Commencement
Next week marks the beginning of the Spring 2019 semester. I’m shocked that it has arrived so quickly, and sure that I’ll be equally shocked when the end arrives in May; that was definitely the case last year.
Buoy Asymmetry
This quiet winter evening (Christmas day, as it turns out) presented a delicate mirroring between sky and earth, broken by the presence of a single buoy.
End of 2018 (Recalling the Lab)
Professionally, 2018 was a good year: my sabbatical work was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. That came from a long time writing and a long time in this lab.
Berkeley Lab’s Frei Group was kind enough to share their space with me, and I could not have done that work without this high vacuum line. I’ve always loved the way understanding the components of a system can take a complicated image like this one and break it into understandable parts. This image, in particular, gets less odd after the realization that this is two lines, mounted back-to-back, in the same Unistrut frame.
Boulevard Garibaldi et la Tour Eiffel
Spokes of major boulevard traffic stretch out from the Tour Montparnasse, golden streaks across the city. The Eiffel Tower makes a perfect vertical accompaniment to the earthbound light channels.
Christmas In Salisbury, Connecticut
Christmas in the Berkshires brings a whole lot of classic, rustic sights.
The Christmas tree is glowing inside, where it’s warm.
Outside, wind tosses snow from the branches.
Holy Symmetry
Though the symmetry of Notre Dame de Paris stands out from the mere mortal constructs around it, I enjoy playing the game of identifying the breaks in its symmetry. Some of those are small, like the different statues around the building. Others are more significant, like the triangle in place or an arch above the left-most set of doors.
Afternoon in Paris
An early winter afternoon on a Parisian street means the minimal aliquot of sunlight peaking between buildings and turning the pedestrians to silhouettes. School just let out in the 15th arrondissement and parents walk their squads of enfants home.
Lampson Falls (Definitive)
The tiny people at the left side of the image provide a sense of the scale for the wide face of Clare, New York’s Lampson Falls. In spite of the frothy surface, the river is placid and friendly before and after the discontinuity.
Wetlands in Fall
Even as deciduous trees enter their period of dormancy, a bright blue river winding its way through a wetland area can’t help but look rich and fertile. Just down stream, Lampson Falls change things up a bit.
Philly and Jersey
New Jersey and Pennsylvania are divided by the Delaware River, site of some serious naval shipyards. In black and white, the whole region takes on a seriously twentieth-century look.
City of the Living and City of the Dead
Though additional cemeteries in Paris were banned in the late 18th century, the Montparnasse Cemetery was opened in 1824 because the area had not yet been incorporated into the city. Today, it’s an odd dark space in the otherwise bright city. The idea of adjacent blocks belonging to graves and apartments has a polite kind of symmetry.
Standard Paris Street
The homogeneity of Parisian streets seemed a little bit anomalous to me until I visited the Catacombs and came to realize that much of the stone making up the city had been quarried from directly beneath it. The cave-ins and collapses that this eventually produced demanded the project of stabilizing these artificial caverns and ultimately made room for the human remains that now occupy them.
Brightest Tower
After nightfall, the Eiffel Tower puts on an hourly strobe light show that transforms the tower into a sparkly pillar in the city skyline. Much as a flash can brighten a photograph, this effect also means that long-exposure photographs of the tower make it the brightest object in the skyline by an order of magnitude.
Paris Catacombs
A certain anthropologist encouraged us to visit the Catacombs of Paris, and we were stunned by the walls of bones. In a decades-long project, more than six million remains were moved to caverns under the city.
I’m not sure I was really prepared to come face-to-face with so many skulls.
Decaseconds 