HDR Photography
I’ve long been interested in visualizing gradients between different levels of density in housing and construction; here in Hartford, Bushnell Tower is the sort of final edge point between the tall structures of downtown and the medium-rise buildings in the rest of the city. Bushnell Park in the foreground acts as a counterpoint to both.
Snow days are rare for adults—but when a nor’easter completely fuses Hartford in place, there’s not much else to do but ride it out. The resulting images were cold but cozy—ready to go with a warm beverage and a good book.
Each winter, a skating rink is frozen into the southern end of Bushnell Park. The neighborhood gains a new sort of place to gather and the city gains that extra pop of brightness and life.
I.M. Pei really outdid himself with the design of Hartford’s Bushnell Tower. While the building is carefully monochrome during the day, I love the various colors exploding from the windows at night.
Saturday marked a final day of warm weather and sunshine before the cold and dark and rain of November closed in on us. The Hartford skyline was positively glowing.
I’ve shown a lot of images of Travelers Tower (one of my favorite pieces of architecture in Hartford), but in my tradition of showing the viewer and the view, this picture also captures the vantage point in Bushnell Tower where those images were taken.
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.
Flying a drone in downtown Hartford requires some extra permissions, but they’re worth chasing for the opportunity to capture shots like this one: Bushnell Tower, the State Capitol, and a rain-checked fireworks display arrayed above Bushnell Park.
Several posts ago, I showed you the view from Mohonk Mountain House’s Skytop, including its fire suppression water supply. Seen from the other side, that reservoir makes for a perfect mid-morning reflection.
I’ll soon be starting work at Trinity, but it doesn’t have a campanile. I went to grad school at Berkeley, which has a campanile. Only at the Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, however, did I find a Trinity that has a campanile of its own.
The move to Hartford has offered me the opportunity to capture this time sequence (like the ones I took in Kentucky and the North Country) with a dramatic view of Travelers Tower over the course of a day. If the image appeals, it’s also available as a dynamic wallpaper for macOS that will change your desktop with the time of day.
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If that picture of Skytop from last week sparked the question, “What does the view look like from the top?” I’ll meet you halfway; this is the view from the climb up. (The rest of the view will come Monday.)
That cliff face exploding from the trees is part of the Shawangunk Range of mountains, home of Mohonk Mountain House.
Moving to downtown Hartford, Connecticut placed this view just outside my window. I used to look across the city to Travelers Tower (the illuminated building at right) from my dorm room at Trinity College; 15 years later, I realize it shone like a beacon because it was being actively lit from nearby rooftops. Perhaps that’s a good lesson for life: the achievements that stand out don’t do so by accident, but because of conscious effort.
Sailboats and Sutro Tower are both iconic components of the Bay Area summer, but the warm Friday afternoon implied by this image is not a part of that post-solstice set. Like many evenings, sweatshirt weather was close at hand.
Seeking to print some images for a tall, narrow section of wall near a window in my office, I realized that I don’t shoot vertically very often. Perhaps that comes from what originally drove my interest in photography—making cooler desktop wallpapers for my computer. I traveled back to 2013 to find a vertical shot that really tickled my fancy (though luckily Adobe’s Super Resolution was up to the task of upsizing for printing.) The warm sodium-vapor-and-neon glow of San Francisco’s Embarcadero (stacked with the Transamerica Pyramid and Coit Tower) are a moment frozen in time, if not least because the switch to LED streetlights is totally changing the hue of an American city at night.
Decaseconds 