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.
Like most infrastructure, a roof is something one generally ignores so long as it is functioning as expected. A heavy melt of snow, however, might call all of that into question. At least the view is good from up here.
Big winter storms make for salty, chaotic snow piles alongside the symmetrical Neo-Gothic architecture of Hartford’s Trinity College.
Fullersburg Woods was the location where I captured some of my earliest Decaseconds posts (all the way back to December 27, 2011!); it was a delight to revisit the location after the nature preserve has been completely restored to the oak savanna ecosystem it originally exhibited.
This connecting courtyard between two Travelers buildings in Hartford has been blocked from foot traffic (I was shooting through a high fence), making it a strange forbidden liminal space. That the two buildings facing each other aren’t actually symmetrical—despite echoing one another—makes it feel like a sort of forbidden zone where reality has faulted somehow.
Snow and scaffolding are each the kind of dramatic additions to a neo-gothic building that suggest the dramatic climax of a noir film will take place on its rooftop.
While we’re contemplating the architecture of Clement Chemistry Building, I don’t think I’ve previously considered the way in which the dark sculptural stone sections connect together the windows on the second and third floors to make these big, tall, dramatic, dark pillars up each side of the building—almost reminiscence of the tall stained-glass windows of a cathedral.
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.
The secretive and elite (and currently-on-probation) St. Anthony’s Hall looks dignified and quiet beneath a layer of snow.
Continuing where I left off, the end-of-semester highly distracting snowfall on Trinity College was a perfect temporary respite.
Snow swept in over the weekend, accompanying the final exam preparations with a highly distracting winter aesthetic.
I decided to make my collection of photographs from my time as a student available to Trinity’s social media team, which required sorting and uploading them. Among the random motion-blurred messes of my past, I encountered the occasional serendipitous moments of actually striking photography.
Midwinter break left the normally bustling Long Walk of Trinity College empty for a moment but a quiet post-snowfall sunset cast shadows into the footsteps the students left behind.
The bold gothic shapes of Clement Chemistry Building are extra-sharp beneath a layer of snow and scattered with golden sunset light.
“Trinity Days” is our college’s late-winter break, which typically leaves campus quiet, but a coating of snow just before classes ended left an array of bootprints to mark their exit.
Decaseconds 