HDR Photography
Looking back through years of photographs, I find that my late-winter/early-spring seasonal photos are nearly empty. The bland pre-bloom colors have a lot to do with that, so I thought I would lean into it with a B&W approach that says, “You didn’t want to see the colors, anyway.”
During the Northeast’s last great storm, I ventured out with my camera to document Hartford’s response and the stillness of the city beneath a layer of sound-absorbing snow.
Big winter storms make for salty, chaotic snow piles alongside the symmetrical Neo-Gothic architecture of Hartford’s Trinity College.
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.
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.
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.
We’ve now long passed the one-year anniversary of my move to Hartford, Connecticut. The benefit of occupying the same post downtown for all of that time is being present for those singular perfect nights with incredible post-storm skies.
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.
Arcs of lightning through stormy clouds add a strong sense of the Frankensteinian to this summer image of Hartford’s skyline. The storm that just capped the city in snow will soon provide an opportunity for a different kind of mad scientist image.
The mixture of mid-twentieth-century architecture, spotlights, lightning, soft focus, and color grading all sum to transform Hartford into Tim Burton’s 1989 vision of Gotham.
The two people looking over the idyllic setting of Mohonk Mountain House from a clifftop gazebo makes this an official entrant in my “the view and the viewer” (alongside this one, this one, probably this one, and definitely this one.)
When an autumn day at St. Lawrence University ends with a storm above the Adirondacks, those horizon raindrops scatter warm hues back to the quadcopter camera.
Though the central glass pyramid of the Louvre gets all the attention, the other pyramids of the Louvre can be just as dramatic (if the perspective is set correctly.)
Reflection symmetry makes the golden dome of Les Invalides all the more imposing.
A late-fall storm slicked the stones of Les Invalides and the sidewalk across the, uh, moat from it.
Decaseconds 