Perfect, breezy, warm, and effulgent spring days have sprawled across Trinity’s campus, rather like students on the quad. Grading papers in my office can at least be softened by an open window and the resulting smell of flowers.
Tag: spring
First Hints of Springtime Around Trinity
Bright sunshine scatters from treetops and roof peaks in Hartford. Buds begin to swell on branches around Trinity’s campus. When the weather is warm, it’s easy to feel that spring is just around the corner.
Two Views on Final Views
A couple of months ago, I published what I anticipate will be my final pictures of St. Lawrence University, and with this post, I believe I’m releasing my final pictures from St. Lawrence County more generally. They’re an interesting pair, because I feel they capture the dichotomy of the area.
The first image is a high, dramatic drone shot into the Adirondacks, taken near Colton. Nature! Topology! Wilderness! (Clicking through to Flickr, you can see this shot was even featured in their Explore page.) This was perhaps what I was expecting when I moved to the North Country. This was the last such picture I captured on a rare quiet weekend while preparing to move out.
The second picture is one I took on the last day of classes at St. Lawrence. A charming view of our small town, I suppose, but also a vast, flat landscape with a few too many parking lots and strip shopping centers to quite constitute rural life. This was perhaps a better depiction of everyday life in the North Country, and a strong contrast with the drone views that I get now.
Hammock Stack
When the weather turns warm (in spring, as in this picture’s case, or in autumn, as in this week’s reality), St. Lawrence’s students do love their hammocks. I think this particular pair of trees may have reached maximum capacity.
Firework Shadows
Fireworks are lovely displays of chemistry and physics in action on their own, of course, but there’s an extra dimension of enjoyment from being part of a crowd and feeling the shared excitement.
Night Walk Home in Spring
Walking home through the blue hour at the height of spring, the momentarily deserted campus made me feel as though I’d passed into some alternate fey dimension—as though I might emerge at some radically different position in time or space.
ODY in B&W
I recently returned to this shot from 2015 to reprocess the original raw for a calendar of B&W images for St. Lawrence. While it may not have Iwan Baan‘s level of people in the image, the bicycle adds a nice sense of quiet, human scale to the setting.
Scenes from the Kentucky Horse Park in Spring
Though “one day, one photograph” is my typical style, the images from my springtime trip to the Kentucky Horse Park (mostly taken while hanging around at the warm-up ring) make a charming slice-of-life set.
Let’s start things off with The Plaid Horse‘s publisher, Dr. Piper Klemm, with Sundae.
While the warm-up ring is ostensibly a place to practice prior to showing, it also often the location of impromptu meetings and morning strolls.
Piper Klemm on Sundae in the warm-up ring.
The warm-up is also a place for horses to shake out some energy and get any necessary attitude adjustment.
Dapples mean a healthy horse.
That preparation time made for positive results in the ring. Trainer Emily Elek congratulations Reuben.
It’s bath time for a sweaty horse done with showing.
Compress-air-powered airbag vests are increasingly common on younger riders.
Early in the morning, the golf carts waited in lines outside the barns—mimicking the positions of nearby horses in their stalls in the barns.
Cell phone videos of warm-up make an exceptionally valuable tool for improvement.
Reuben very occasionally sticks out his tongue and I find it funnier than I should.
A close overlap between conversation-walk and warm-up-canter in the warm-up ring.
Piper on Reuben.
The pattern of planting boxes reminded me of the pacing of strides riders seek to find approaching a jump.
Junior rider Lexi Miller relaxes between rounds.
Bridge to Heritage Park
As a child, I was deeply interested in the idea of islands—these isolated, well-defined chunks of land that were separated from everyone else. My favorite LEGO sets were those modeling pirates marooned on desert islands. I wonder what my childhood self would have thought of living in a town with an uninhabited island at its center?
Horses Walking, Left to Right
Horse shows are these magical intergenerational spaces where equestrians of all ages come to compete. In the three images below, I found a trio of similar images in which riders at different points in their careers traverse the frame from left to right.
Jaunty Step
After a serious and staid dressage performance on a surprisingly chilly spring day, I have to imagine that it’s delightful to go for a bouncy stroll around the grassy fields of Kentucky Horse Park.
Afternoon Horse Park Walk
Kentucky Horse Park has a bit of a “Jurassic Park” vibe, but going for a stroll on a spring afternoon is far less likely to result in being devoured by a velociraptor.
Islands in the Grasse River
From a less literal island in my last post to much more literal set on the other side of the country: this scattering of islands in the center of Canton, New York are equally their own little tree-clusters.
Land Rover Defender
Being both a “horse person” and a “car person,” I was naturally chuffed to find a brand-new Land Rover Defender at the Saratoga Horse Show this spring.
Heritage Trail
A trail, complete with cool stairs and abandoned ruins, on an island in the middle of town is something my childhood self would have been absolutely over the moon with. From a drone’s eye view, I think that sense of magic is effectively captured.
Decaseconds 