HDR Photography
Though I have my fair share of images that were only possible with the full capabilities of my best camera (just wait for Monday’s post), I’ve been experiencing the impact of Chase Jarvis’s famous quotation lately: “The best camera is the one you have with you.” This perfect warm spring afternoon moment on Trinity College’s main quad was one I serendipitously passed and the image that resulted wasn’t one I would have missed for not having the “perfect” camera.
Looking back for images of Trinity’s Life Science Center (LSC) prior to some recent renovations in the area, I found a set of early digital camera pictures I’d taken that happened to form the components for a panorama. The idea of compositing images to a panorama wasn’t one that entered my brain back in 2008, and yet I had chanced into capturing just the right combination to do so 16 years later.
Another June brings another set of reunions to Trinity’s campus, but the experience is notably different now that I’m a faculty member who walks across this quad every weekday on my way to the office.
Sunset light shining through the bells of Trinity College’s chapel is an entirely new sight for me.
This central section of Trinity College’s campus was announced as a new addition to the National Register of Historic Places on the anniversary of the College’s founding 201 years ago.
Perfect, breezy, warm, and effulgent spring days have sprawled across Trinity’s campus, rather like students on the quad. Grading papers in my office can at least be softened by an open window and the resulting smell of flowers.
After an unfortunate run-in with a tree on a windy day, my drone is repaired and back in the air. A big, dramatic sunset scene of Trinity College is the perfect capstone for may last day at work this semester. The repaired chapel seemed a fitting parallel to the repaired quadcopter.
On an otherwise rectilinear campus, the gentile bubble-arcs of Trinity College’s Gates Quad provide a relaxing geometry that mirrors the true uses of a quad in student life.
Peak foliage on Trinity College’s campus looks as effulgent as always, but there’s an added perk in being able to see my downtown-Hartford home in the same shot. (It helps that the building is 27 stories tall, I’ll admit…)
These bright oranges around the quad last fall marked the formal inauguration of St. Lawrence’s latest president, Kathryn A. Morris.
Fall brings both fantastic foliage and dramatic sunsets to the North Country; my favorite evenings are those in which the hues of the the sky and the leaves match the red brick of St. Lawrence University’s Richardson Hall.
This post represents a big moment for me: the first image from my new Sony α7R IV. This is only the third serious digital camera; my first was a Nikon D3100, and I’ve been shooting primarily with a D7000 for the past eight years. The capabilities from a decade of technological advancement and the engineering switch to a mirrorless design have pretty-well blown my mind. I really recommend clicking through to Flicker to look at this image at full scale—the tiny pinpricks of each star, the details in the windows of every building. The 61-MP capabilities of the α7R IV maybe be considered overkill by some, but I’m finding it to be the perfect tool for the kinds of “zoom in forever”-detailed photographs that I love to produce.
We may be deep within the glowing core of autumn in the Northeast at this moment, but I can’t escape the feeling that spring and its attendant graduation drama is fast approaching. If winter proves deep and dark, that may prove itself to be an illusion.
We returned to Trinity College in Hartford, CT, for Reunion this year. It was a classic reunion setting—back ‘neath the elms, on a perfect summer night. I’ve increasingly found that, rather than being an occasion for excess nostalgia, reunions are a tonic against over-romanticizing college. It takes actually visiting to realize that the location is different from the group of people who were once assembled there.
Following on the dorm-based nostalgia I felt last week, this image of Trinity College’s Jarvis Hall (where I lived during my first year in college) hits even deeper into the I-recently-attended-my-10-year-college-reunion space.
Decaseconds 