The North Country, like many rural places in America, has rugged expanses of nature abutting everyday locations. Example: the Buccaneer Lounge has this marvelous array of rapids just past its charming array of picnic tables.
Tag: photography
Ottawide 2014
Visiting nearby Canada means looking at a mirror-version of the United States, reflected across the border. Like looking in a mirror, everything is still recognizable. Up is still up. Down is still down. But the brands and the metric units and the nationalism is different. Does looking in the reflection of Ottawa in the Shaw Centre reverse the transformation?
An added bonus: this is technically a self-portrait, with my tiny self down in the foreground.
American Diner
It’s a bar. It’s a diner. It’s a motel. Here’s a structural distillation of mid-twentieth century America; it’s the kind of place to drive you car, drink your beer, then lay down for a good night’s sleep.
Weekend Special: Lampson
Summer hit the North Country like a truck, ricocheting us from frosty mornings to hyperdense afternoons in the space of a single week. Out in nature, the volatile organic compounds are thick on the breeze. Even the sky is bluer. Above Lampson Falls, everything is placid.
Camping on the beach beneath the falls is grand—though less so when a thunderstorm is right around the corner. The beach shows evidence of the water readily rising.
Bow of Single Sky
Alongside landscapes and seascapes, I’m presenting a skyscape. Alternative blue skies and marine layers presented little aerial grandeur in the Bay Area, but the East Coast offers expanses of badass clouds in excess.
Walk in the Woods I
Urban campuses are folded up and compact, an array of buildings and narrow pathways between them. Quads are a sacrifice on the order of placing Central Park in the middle of Manhattan. St. Lawrence’s campus is literally thousands of acres, much of which is still fields or forests. College is a different experience for students who can go for a hike or hop in a canoe for the afternoon without leaving campus.
After the Students Are Gone 2016
Commencement was yesterday, and I’m proud to see my students move beyond college—but the quiet, empty campus starts to resemble a Zen garden more than a school.
Marine Layer San Diego
Like many East Coasters, I hadn’t heard of the marine layer until my first visit to the West Coast. The odd, damped mornings in coastal cities seem so at odds with the view of California in popular culture. Even sunny San Diego is matte and dull under a blanket of morning clouds.
Behold, Mt. Jefferson!
Gaze over an enormous, Western, natural landscape, full of Bob-Ross-esque mountains, full of happy little trees. (Well, mostly happy. Probably not the ones in the areas that have been clear-cut.) HDR techniques make images detailed and unreal and unnatural; wet-plate effects (courtesy Analog Effex Pro 2) make images soft and faded. Using the two together, as in this photo of Mt. Jefferson taken from Mt. Hood, makes for something more supernatural than unnatural.
ADK Autumn
Students bring energy and excitement to my world, so there’s no more exciting time of the year than the start of fall. Though the school year has just ended and summer is beginning, I’m already looking forward to the next season. I live in some bizarro-world version of what I remember experiencing as a boy, when I awaited the start of summer and dreaded the return of the school year.
Small College Town
There are a lot of small, rural towns with the odd culture bloom of colleges planted in their cores. I think it’s the ancillary buildings, the old fraternities and club houses with their mix of higher grandeur and shabbier paint, that most signal one of these villages
That extra school year energy of students wandering the campus at all hours provides an extra energy to a sleepy place. I miss it in the summer.
Hipster Library?
There are three ways to interpret the title:
- Seattle is a city known (deservedly or not) for its hipsters. This is Central Library of the Seattle Public Library system, and could thus earn the title based on location alone.
- The building was designed by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus in part a celebration of printed books: “Despite the arrival of the 21st century and the ‘digital age,’ people still respond to books printed on paper.” The appreciation for classic technology could be accused of being hip.
- I found the gold and cyan colors of the early-morning shot reminded me of archecture more vintage (i.e. 1970’s) than morning, and went “full Instagram” in processing it. Perhaps I’m the hipster?
Last Sunset of Spring 2016
Semesters mostly end in a slow burn to the end of final exams. There’s a different end date for almost every student; only seniors share a collective terminus at graduation (and they’re too conflicted about the whole thing to really enjoy it, I’ve noticed.) Last year, I used Decaseconds to document the feeling of the campus contracting, like a balloon in liquid nitrogen, at the end of the semester. This year, the sky and the sun seemed ready to provide a dramatic end to this semester’s classes.
Fusion Ball
That Newtonian worldview (one of cause and effect, of a Universe that is fundamentally understandable), so often criticized as unromantic and clinical, makes this setting transform: where there was once a bucolic sunset over empty fields, there is now a repeating pattern of polymerized sugars on an iron-cored planet, gravitationally bound to a thermonuclear fireball. Isn’t that cooler?
Empire Hotel on Broadway
A classic New York street scene: the charm of the Empire Hotel alongside the NYPD and and bags of trash. Maybe the old man’s flyers are right: could the world be ending? (Probably not.)
Decaseconds 