HDR Photography
On National Connecticut Day (apparently a Real Thing since 2017), I wanted to show these three views from around our state capital. They’re united by a strategy of processing the images darker in exposure than I might normally, producing deep, dark tones and highlights safe from being blown out.
Rain at sunset leaves behind a Hartford looking exactly like I always hoped my city-home would. The smaller buildings in the foreground and the taller structures in the distance have a perfect coincidence to make layer after layer of space vanishing into the golden sky.
After a 2025 spent with construction fencing and destroyed surfaces, Bushnell Park in downtown Hartford is back and better than ever.
Don’t make me get up early, but if I’m awake anyway… Give me a good sunrise.
Though even April doesn’t guarantee and escape from blizzards in New England, I’m nonetheless cathartically purging myself of wintery aesthetics, like I.M. Pei’s Bushnell Tower standing proud at the edge of Hartford’s downtown.
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.
Decaseconds 