Summer canoeing is months in the past at Mohonk Mountain House; snow and rime crust the boat dock. On the cliffs in the distance, the hotel’s signature gazebos are (mostly) unoccupied and winter is settling in.
Tag: photography
Hearst (MMB) Holidays
Following Thanksgiving, all structures seems to sprout these luminescent, multicolored silica-and-copper growths. I’m sure the world’s building biologists are hard at work on a cure for “Christmas lights”, but in the mean time, they sure are pretty.
Contemplating Age
Decaseconds turns five years old just about this week, and today I’m turning 30. “Now” is a good time to think about age and the passage of time, I suppose, but I’d rather focus on something else: achievement. We’ve gotten a lot done in the past years—and there’s a lot more to come. Looking back on my early photographs on places like Berkeley’s Campanile, I can see all of the steps that led me to now. On to the next year!
Mystery Island and Bridge
Flying a quadcopter feels a heck of a lot like flying did in my childhood dreams. Nap-of-the-earth flying reveals new textures and geometries that were invisible from the group. I was perhaps most surprised to realize how bright a road can be, relative to dense summer foliage.
American Hogwarts
Mohonk Mountain House is a unique hotel in the hills above New Paltz, New York. Though I visited there during the summer as a youth (while reading Harry Potter, naturally), this was my first visit as an adult and during the winter. None of the magic has been lost during the seasons in between.
Calcifer
Random log geometries give every fire a unique geometry; I couldn’t avoid seeing eyes (and a face) in this particular conflagration.
Salisbury After the Storm
Winter arrived in the Northeast with maximum attitude: from 66ºF on Saturday morning to a full-on blizzard by Sunday. In Salisbury, CT, home of ski jumps and wood-lined hotel bars, we got to experience the odd dynamic of watching Porsche and Mercedes SUVs claw through the snow. The classic White Hart hotel was looking its best.
I tested my DJI Phantom 3 Advanced in the post-storm conditions. Almost-freezing, windy conditions didn’t have an impact on its flight performance, but the gimbal didn’t seem too thrilled. Some of its smooth elegance was lost… Or maybe it was just the wind.
Foliage Tunnel
College campuses have long, tree-lined walks; those are great places to find this “yellow leaf tunnel” effect.
Close of Business, Election Day
Even on Election Day, businesses are open and running and life continues in the North Country. At the grain elevator, farmers arrive and depart not just by truck, but also (in the case of our Amish neighbors) by horse-drawn buggy. At the end of the day, businesses quiet down but haven’t quite closed yet and everything becomes still.
South on 11
Without a nearby Interstate, materials move through the North Country along Route 11 in much the same way I imagine they did pre-1956. The Cascade diner and the Buccaneer Lounge beneath it, glowing with neon lighting on the right side of the picture, date from the early Interstate era. When I visit them for a burger and I beer, my mind always wanders to Eisenhower and Kennedy and the other presidents who presided over the development of the Interstate system. Highway access remains on the mind, I’m sure, of ever person who commutes in and out of the North Country, too.
On the Tracks
Stick season has arrived, with orange everywhere. Holes in the trees have appeared and the optical topology has some new path options. Even the steel tracks now appear some copper other-metal.
Untitled
Under the Sphere
Large-scale sculptures on college campuses set the tone of these places, focusing the on spaces for the mind to experiment and grow. I’ve always found it a bit ironic that the mind will grow to find these odd structures everyday and ordinary.
Welcoming
Admissions buildings are always charming, but the blue hour on a crisp fall afternoon creates optimal conditions for charm. Not a single leaf is out of place.
Corn Hill
Even the small local farms of the North Country can seem overwhelmingly huge, and viewing them from a quadcopter’s vantage point doesn’t mitigate the effect.
Decaseconds 