Tag: Salisbury

Salisbury After the Storm

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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.

Salisbury After the Storm

Edge of the Big Forest

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In this particular corner of Connecticut in early spring, the rain and snow combined to make the perfect storybook fog. This image is so quaint and charming, I could swear I’d seen it somewhere before.

But this brings me to another idea: those particular locations in landscape photography so scenic that they are literally ubiquitous. Take the tunnel view in Yosemite, or shots of the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin Headlands, or downtown Manhattan as seen from the top of Rockafeller Center as examples: is it even possible to make an original composition from such a photographically saturated place? But these places are also photographically saturated for a reason: they’re really, really pretty. Where does that trade-off between originality and beauty fall?

Edge of the Big Forest

The Fall and the Pool

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A year ago, I stood atop this waterfall in the corner of Connecticut, relaxing and hiking in the last few days before I traveled north to Canton to begin the faculty life. There are three things that this image captures:

  • So many waterfall pictures use a long exposure to smooth the water into some blurry, surreal, Platonic ideal of flow. The effect might be pretty, but that effect is also a lie about the true experience of the crashing and splashing. Let’s get some spray in here!
  • Poetically standing atop a waterfall in a wood, with a calming pool nearby, seems to me less a cliché than something that is consistently authentic across the American experience.
  • Nostalgia may power a lot of my images, but it’s a force that only works retroactively. I would feel very different about the image if I’d promptly slipped and trashed my camera. Can that “dodged danger” exist within the image itself?

The Fall and the Pool

Home Books

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All of the other posts this week have been about surreal half-worlds of alienation and pensive detachment. I’d like Friday to be about something warmer, cheerier, and generally less dark: the concept of home. Without resorting to too much cliché, home can be in the shape of the windows or the parallel lines of painted floor boards, but it can also be seeing the same books in the bookcase that were there when you were a child. They were there then, and they’re still there now, and even if, “You can never go home,” you can always go back to the idea and the place and the books will be there.

Home Books

Breakfast Run

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As a spectroscopist and inorganic chemist, I’m constantly encountering symmetry and its effects. From the balanced shapes of molecules to the bilateral formation of our own bodies, nature is full of symmetry that informs its function and behavior. In addition to symmetry in physical space, the kind with which we are most familiar, there is also symmetry in the dimension of time. Some examples are rather uninteresting from an “elegant universe” perspective: the cycles of alternating current exhibit high symmetry, but hide under the surface of our everyday electronics.

The cycles of seasons, on the other hand, have been on my mind lately as the North Country oscillates rapidly between spring and winter. (One day on, one day off.) In those cycles, I’ve found a strange symmetry. Though most of the year lacks reflection symmetry (autumn is obviously different from spring), there’s a point where late fall lines up perfectly with early spring—the world is cold and still and brown, and I can pretend for a moment that the winter never happened.

Breakfast Run

Natural Pool

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In the Twainesque memories of childhood in northwestern Connecticut, cannonballing into this naturally formed pool at the foot of a waterfall stands out:

The stone is hard and slippery. The water is transparent and glacially cold. The my feet touch a soft bed of fallen needles at the bottom. And when I finally climb out, the moss is soft and the sunlight warms me.

Natural Pool

Quiet Kill

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The “real-world Zen garden” effect of northwestern Connecticut at the end of November was just the calming experience I needed: after a busy semester, stopping for a moment by the edge of slow stream, standing among the red, crinkly fallen leaves and short grasses, and feeling the wind lift puffs of snow from the rocks to my face.

Quiet Kill

Dragon Mountain in Winter

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This hill in northwestern Connecticut is, tragically, not really named “Dragon Mountain.” That never kept my elementary-school-aged self from calling it that. The way it rises, green and different, from the surrounding winter landscape brought to mind Smaug, sleeping under the mountain. At age seven, I half-wished that it would awaken and soar above the miniature houses below.

Dragon Mountain in the Winter