HDR Photography
This image is my submission to the Spring Photo Contest being run by Grasse River Heritage; the river and its associated park are its subject. I delight in being asked to work under requirements—in this case, both a subject and a time of year—because I feel it focuses me. I get to achieve something specific, which adds some delightful pressure to flying my quadcopter around the island.
While the distant New Jersey countryside looks comparatively two-dimensional, the structure of Manhattan and Hoboken are so vertical.
The castle is the other way! Of course, this sightseer is aiming in just the right direction to see the Dancing House upriver.
The holiday season in Bohemia is ideally appreciated from a heated outdoor table on the Vltava River.
Along Prague’s Vltava River, this pattern of one-bird-per-piling appears to be very strict throughout the day. At sunset, however, the pattern reaches its most dramatic. I guess everyone wants a view.
Just before the solstice, I most appreciate processing my pictures from spring. The needles and fallen leaves of winter are still on the ground in this image from Lampson Falls, but new life is pushing through.
(Can you spot me on the left side of the picture, at the top of the falls?)
Evoking superhuman scale in photographs really requires a human scale bar, and the tiny people on the bridge were obliging enough to wear rain jackets in red, yellow, and turquoise that stand out from the natural hues.
After a week of overcast November days, the emergence of Rayleigh-scattered blue in the skies above Prague meant I hurried to the top of St. Vitus Cathedral to get the pictures of Old Town of which I’d been dreaming.
Bright stone buildings on the banks of Prague’s Vltava River contrast with the deep blues and greens of the surrounding nature.
We were visiting Prague in the off-season—that’s what we heard from every cab driver and waiter. Though gentle spring breezes had been replaced with nascent winter gusts, there were numerous benefits; the relative sparsity of fellow tourists in Old Town made for easy access to the city’s sights. Two of the subtler benefits are captured in this image: (1) the bare branches opened new views of the skyline, and (2) the Smetana hotel (just across the river) where we stayed had a spectacular room overlooking the Vltava open for us.
Evening at the end of November, dinner on the river is charming… But I can only imagine the experience in May.
There are so many gulls along the Vltava in Prague that the rectilinear stacks going up the hillside are accompanied, courtesy a long exposure time, by smooth, curving surfaces of bird flight.
With the trees free of leaves, the orderly arrays of lights along Petřín reveal its nature as a lovely park space in the city.
In a too-on-the-nose metaphor, here the Oswegatchie River joints the St. Lawrence River, with Canada looking on; this week, a new class (2024!) of Laurentians arrived to St. Lawrence University’s campus.
Autumn may not be peak tourist season in Prague, but the remaining foliage makes for an effective supplement to the red and white that otherwise dominate the city’s color palette.
