HDR Photography
Even the grandest of hotels have infrastructure that supports the guest experience. For a grand old hotel like Mohonk Mountain House, that infrastructure is charming enough to be interesting in its own right.
Those early-twentieth-century structures—boilers and exhaust stacks and hand-painted signs noting the protocols for refilling the massive fuel oil tanks.
The end of sabbatical meant saying “goodbye” to the Normandy Village and its quaint weirdness. I’ll always remember them as my collaborator described them: “The little Hansel and Gretel houses.”
Deep night colors on the snow cliffs contrast with the warm glow of the hotel; this could be an infrared image, mapping the local temperatures.
Mid-March shift from my most photographically productive time on the West Coast (amazing sunsets, end of the rainy season, etc.) to my least in the East (dirty snow, still-bare trees, sandy roads). I’ve been trying to find more beauty in the pre- and post-winter “stick seasons,” examining the shapes revealed when leaves and snow can’t hide branches. Though I’m not yet convinced to do anything more than grudgingly accept its necessity, but it led to some pretty dramatic reflections at Mohonk Mountain House.
There should probably be a person-sized helmet in this picture (and a dog-sized one, too), but a quick morning coffee run in Kentucky Horse Park is probably going to slide under the radar.
The oldest buildings on St. Lawrence’s campus have seen their share of winter storms (particularly these frustrating, wet-snow-in-March varieties), and always seem to be at their most comfortable under a coat of snow.
Given the extraordinary nature of the Normandy Village, “regular” cars seem oddly out of place. Perhaps that in part because the average car has grown so significantly in size since the little bays of the village were built.
Am I trying my hand at some sort of hipster chillwave/yacht rock album cover? No, just displaying my excitement to read Never Use Futura.
Among the vertical redwood shapes, the occasional contradictory tree trajectory is on its way to becoming a bridge.
I never thought much of Berkeley’s Cedar Street during my time in graduate school, but returning for sabbatical brought me a very different connection with it. Cedar functioned as the main connection from my apartment on Spruce to Shattuck’s Gourmet Ghetto, and so I traveled it for every purpose from getting coffee and groceries to an extravagant dinner at Chez Panisse.
Though I’m sure both the homes and the boats of Tiburon cost dearly for their charming setting, it’s easy to forget all of that when the sun is going down and a cool breeze is blowing in the from the San Francisco Bay. That little gray house in the middle with all of the little extra architectural details is my favorite.
High above the wet woods of northern Vermont in early winter, the contrast between dark coniferous trees and blanched deciduous trees makes for a mottled appearance. Down amongst that Ising Model of tree distribution, a little building or two make for odd inhomogeneities.
Coffee consumption is high among professors and highest among scientists of any profession, so it’s only appropriate that a portrait of me in Berkeley’s Normandy Village for sabbatical should include a generous cup of joe.
Rolling hills (in this case, outside Park City, Utah) normally vanish into Rayleigh-scattered blue haze. (That was particularly the case this summer in Utah.) The magic of a red filter for black and white photography is to simultaneously reverse both the fading and the bluing effect. The result are landscapes like this that seem to go on “forever”.
I’m not sure quite what the title simile means, but this picture from our trip to the Cincinnati Zoo does speak to a certain lack of elegance on the part of the reptilian half of the relation.
Decaseconds 