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.
Tag: photography
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.
Boats in the Seine Near Notre Dame
The bridge in the distance is the Pont au Double, and it is one of several that connect the Rive Gauche to Île de la Cité. That central island fascinates me because it is the site of the medieval refounding of the city. The island used to be packed with residences alongside government and religious buildings. Today it is almost entirely dominated by the latter buildings (like Notre Dame on the right), yet I heard that census information still lists a few hundred people living on the island. Where are those last homes hiding?
Tour Eiffel
There’s that perfect moment when the sky is still blue but the oranges of sodium vapor lamps begin to scatter from the surfaces of the clouds and the Eiffel Tower looks particularly otherworldly. When so many American cities have switched to lighting their streets with white LED lights, I was surprised at how much of Paris is still lit by sodium lamps.
The Best View in Paris
A Parisian cliché says that the best view of the city comes from the top of the Tour Montparnasse—because it’s the only shot in which the enormous tower can’t be seen. My trip to Paris last week didn’t give me the time to establish that definitively, but I can certainly attest that the city looks fantastic from the deck. Cityscapes like this were what originally inspired me to get into HDR photography a decade ago, and they still fascinate me now.
Framing the Trinity Chapel
Summer made a perfect match of the elm leaves and Trinity College’s chapel. I wonder if the alignment looks as good with rime on the branches?
Pre-Rain
Between these two shots, the sunset light over Canton, New York changed very suddenly. Rain arrived within the hour.
