HDR Photography
Cool Rayleigh-scattered blue light, warm also-Rayleigh-scattered sunset light, clean white LEDs reflecting off of snow, deep orange sodium lights—there’s every option visible from above Trinity College’s campus.
White covers Trinity’s campus and accents the Neo-Gothic architecture, but the modernist skyline of Hartford in the distance perpetually suggests what else might architecturally be. Though I love twentieth century architecture, there’s little argument that it would have been the wrong choice for a small liberal arts college. It wasn’t until recently that I came to realize that many of these old-looking buildings are less than 100 years old; in essence, they were built to be old-fashioned from the start. Most east-coast schools are a sort of academic Disneyland—one constructed long enough ago that we forgot about the artifice and now see only authenticity.
Strong CMEs arrived at Earth to find… cloud cover, at least over Hartford. I nonetheless flew my drone and I can almost convince myself that I see some green glow coming through the clouds amid the city lights scattering back.
The administration’s end of the Long Walk, with handy HR and deans’ offices, isn’t one I visit as frequently but it’s no less beautiful in the fall.
Though the laws of optics may prevent me from ever reaching the literal end of a rainbow, this double (nearly triple) rainbow over Hartford certainly captures the emotional content of my central-Connecticut experiences.
Quiet summer evenings along Trinity College’s Long Walk, so calm and dignified and neogothic, are best complemented by the shiny silver paint of a vintage Porsche 911.
“Skyline” might be applied more frequently to grand cityscapes, but the sight of Northam Hall and the Chapel standing out amount the Connecticut hillsides is as nostalgic a view as Manhattan to me.
The warm sodium glow of Trinity College’s campus by night—Clement Chemistry Building and Raether Library in the foreground, the chapel and the Hartford skyline in the background—highlights (in a literal, X-marks-the-spot manner) the contrast between being a student and a faculty member here. Though the same institution, the same general campus, I spend my time now in completely different places than I once did. A prime example is the X-marked courtyard between the two buildings—a place I walked through perhaps 10 times total as a student, but where I now pause for coffee with my colleagues nearly every morning.
With Hartford’s skyline looking on in the background, the brutalist facade of Trinity College’s LSC matches the carefully graded dirt of its adjacent quad before a thick layer of new sod was applied.
This view—past tall metal fences, over bright yellow industrial pipes and through palm trees, would fit well in the cyberpunk environs of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City. Having not been back for several years, I was as entranced as ever by the strange mishmash that constitutes SoCal.
There’s some sang about the photographer, not the camera, mattering to a great shot; while I appreciate the value of having the right tools, this sunrise image captured in a quick moment with my phone on a 1ºF morning provides some evidence to support the theory. The low temperatures quickly nucleated ice crystals from towers across the city and produced this dramatic array of miniature clouds.
Far away over Frog Hollow, the towers of Trinity College jut out from the autumn foliage.
Halloween season brings the most New-England-y aesthetics to New England, and nowhere more than in a city park. The foliage adds a perfect contrast to blue-hour colors, and the park lights (as in the foreground) highlight the evening walkers.
The streets outside The Bushnell are a lot quieter and emptier on summer evenings when no show is happening, but the few automobiles present still provide a sense of scale to its dramatic structure.
A weekend of terrifying phone-buzzes presaging possible tornadoes provided two positive outcomes come Sunday evening: (1) no tornadoes (more importantly) and (2) an incredible, dramatic sunset sky over Hartford.
Decaseconds 