HDR Photography
This was one of those moments of pure chance. I was just coming back from a long weekend and hit rain just outside of the Tri-Cities while on some winding mountain roads. Then all of a sudden the rain let up just as I was passing Watauga Lake just in time to see this incredible mist coming off the lake. Within 10 minutes of taking this shot the mist had completely dissipated.
The North Country, like many rural places in America, has rugged expanses of nature abutting everyday locations. Example: the Buccaneer Lounge has this marvelous array of rapids just past its charming array of picnic tables.
It’s a bar. It’s a diner. It’s a motel. Here’s a structural distillation of mid-twentieth century America; it’s the kind of place to drive you car, drink your beer, then lay down for a good night’s sleep.
Students bring energy and excitement to my world, so there’s no more exciting time of the year than the start of fall. Though the school year has just ended and summer is beginning, I’m already looking forward to the next season. I live in some bizarro-world version of what I remember experiencing as a boy, when I awaited the start of summer and dreaded the return of the school year.
Semesters mostly end in a slow burn to the end of final exams. There’s a different end date for almost every student; only seniors share a collective terminus at graduation (and they’re too conflicted about the whole thing to really enjoy it, I’ve noticed.) Last year, I used Decaseconds to document the feeling of the campus contracting, like a balloon in liquid nitrogen, at the end of the semester. This year, the sky and the sun seemed ready to provide a dramatic end to this semester’s classes.
Too early in the evening and too high in the sky to be a standard sunset: this must be some serious sci-fi gridfire weaponry. The patterns in the Crepuscular rays puts me in mind of MIRV tests, and the scale of the clouds so thoroughly dwarfs the buildings beneath it on the banks of the Hudson River. Connecting spectacular aerial views with apocalyptic power is nothing new, but the twentieth century swapped the power source from divine to human.
That Newtonian worldview (one of cause and effect, of a Universe that is fundamentally understandable), so often criticized as unromantic and clinical, makes this setting transform: where there was once a bucolic sunset over empty fields, there is now a repeating pattern of polymerized sugars on an iron-cored planet, gravitationally bound to a thermonuclear fireball. Isn’t that cooler?
Suddenly, the grass is infinitely green and thick and the trees have buds again. There’s this fundamentally Scandinavian feeling to the rolling hills and pine forests of the North Country that is best captured in spring and early summer. The world looks like a Bob Ross painting.
Spring comes slowly to the North Country, and the weather always seems to far outpace the biological response. The trees give no indication that temperatures have remained solidly in the “warm” category for weeks now. I remain hopeful for the photosynthetic inevitability.
This highway in the hillside makes the mountain look rather smug, I think. This is the Han Solo of rocky formations.
Bannerman’s Castle on Pollepel Island in the Hudson River was once an arsenal, and then a tourist destination, before it burned down in 1969 and the island was closed to the public. Now the fortified silhouette of the ruins apparently inspires an incredible amount of use as a hideout for the supernatural in fantasy fiction. Though I didn’t know it at the time I took this picture, this island is one of the major inspirations for Lev Grossman’s Brakebills College. A sunset train ride down the Hudson River is the perfect occasion to stumble on a structure like this.
Toaster glow sunlight was the result of through marine-layer haze coating San Diego every evening. I couldn’t help but notice the three abnormally large ships in this image: In the distance, two Navy aircraft carriers are the essence of industrial, practical form. Moored in the foreground is a truly massive sailing yacht that is 100% style. Look at how it dwarfs even the ostentatious motorboats beside it. Quite the contrast.
Ice and snow and real winter have locked down the countryside, but I still have the photographic evidence of our ultra-mild, el-Niño-powered January.
Away from the village centers, the North Country is frozen at an odd point in development. The original farms of early settlers haven’t been completely removed, but not much development has continued past that point. Trailers were installed by the sides of hot-mix roads and everything stopped there. I’m fascinated to think what this area must have been like during the late 1940s—population returning as the nation demobilized, and those people changing things in the North Country. Things don’t seem to change as much now.
Livestock of the North Country are, well, lively, even in winter. The shaggy coat and the bright sky must help. On a night with a sunset like this one, I share the llama’s need to go out and investigate.
Decaseconds 
