HDR Photography
It’s the first day of class for St. Lawrence today, so I’m getting ready and looking towards the future and so forth, but it’s also a great time to look back on the past. It’s been more than a year since I visited South Africa, and when it’s -15ºF on the walk to work, thinking about the Zulu Nyala game reserve can bring back some pleasant memories. It’s the details that stick with me: the fences made from whole sticks of wood, rather than boards, and that particular red color of the soil.
I’ve been on a serious St. Lawrence-in-the-snow photography kick lately, but pictures like this shot of Kirk Douglas Hall (the campus’s newest dorm) really justify the trend. Framed by trees and isolated in the snow, the idyllic nature of the place is enhanced.
The wind blew warm at 45ºF, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and then a new front blew in bringing -15ºF temperatures and, eventually, a load of snow. Standing in the oddly warm breeze, sun suddenly in my eyes, felt momentous. When I looked at this image, with its huge, Yggdrasil-esque tree and Bifröst-esque rainbow and flair of atoptics, I couldn’t help but think that I had my own backyard version of Ragnarök.
(This post was extra-fun to write because of all the excellent, Nordic umlauts.)
In case you were wondering where I get the expression that St. Lawrence University looks like “a ski resort without the ski slopes,” last weekend provided some pretty good evidence. The modern-but-slightly-Nordic buildtings, the oft-cleared pathways, and the gates with reflective tape on them all remind me of ski lodges. Perhaps the best way to describe the school during winter break is a ski lodge for cross-country skiers?
No cropping, no HDR, and only minimal post-processing were applied to this image. Wandering in a snowstorm with a prime lens felt, well, primal, and I wanted an image that captured that. I know that there’s no such thing as the “true” photograph of a place or a moment, but at the edge of St. Lawrence’s campus, at this particular blue hour, the magic needed no adulteration.
This is the kind of image that I look back on the most: the ones with the strongest sense of place, the most obvious path to escape into the image. As we start a new year, I’d like to think that it’s a mark of my increased confidence as a photographer that I can make more with less. (Though don’t get me wrong—there are times when I’m glad to be able to make something out of nothing.)
Pardon my sappy cliché for the moment: a brand new year and a perfect, untouched field with interesting features in the distance. Here we go!
Today is New Year’s Eve: out with the old, in with the new, etc. Time doesn’t seem to pass in Florida, however—it’s a place that’s always at the dawn of history, the muggy primordial swamp, with the monolith and the howling primates just outside the frame.
When I travel from the wintery expanse of the North Country to Florida, nothing feels real. Am I in some humid almost-heaven of trees and life and ponies? The massive sun halo doesn’t hurt the effect—that’s for sure.
One of my favorite times (of the entire year) for photography is after Christmas dinner. Life is slow and sedate, and it matched the placid(ish) rolls of the Gulf of Mexico perfectly. Even the shapes of people are soft and indistinct—an impressionist’s idea of a family playing in the waves. Spending the holidays in Florida has a certain appeal.
When the weather outside is frightful, go to Florida! With sunrises like this to greet me, I might never leave.
There is something enormously satisfying about the moments when a great shot comes directly to me—no setup, no searching, no prep. I looked outside, the scene was beautiful, and all I had to do was compose and shoot. The “easy” feelings keep coming in Florida: I don’t have to shovel any snow, either.
From the crust of winter, looking back to summer and reunions and picnics on the quad brings that inner warmth.
Feeling a bit of the black-and-white mood at the moment, I wanted to bring in this shot of a pony at Stonewall Farm in Ixonia, Wisconsin, that focuses on the textures of ice-encrusted hair and big, friendly eyes.
The North Country is carpeted in snow (not shown). I like to think back to the lazy, shoveling-free fall days when homes were just beginning to mystically gird themselves for the oncoming blizzard. Life merrily passes by these old, modest homes.
Late fall doesn’t mean rich, verdant scenes or flame-colored leaves. In the North Country, late fall really means early winter. The fields are brown, the trees are bare, and the scene is dusted with snow. Other than the greens of the pines, the world hibernates. The birds scattering to the air are the only signs of life, but the scene has a sort of cliché, stark beauty.
When photographed with a wide-open aperture and that “bokehlicious” depth of field, amplified by the Brenzier method, a quiet corner in St. Lawrence University’s Johnson Hall of Science can be magically welcoming. That particular chair in the corner, lit from above, looks like just the place to kick back and learn some science.
Decaseconds 