HDR Photography
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.
Beautiful views from our Hartford balcony have been a consistent Decaseconds theme, and during much of the year (i.e., the colder months), those views usually come through these two big panels of glass that comprise our sliding door. Original to the building, they are thin and leaky and corroded and it’s time to move into the future… But the limits of what can fit up the elevator mean that we’ll be swapping to a three-panel set of doors to replace the two-panel set with which we began. I’m not sure I’m even necessarily disappointed, but I knew I’d be remiss if I didn’t capture the view as I’ve come to recognize it.
There’s an excellent playground in Hartford’s Bushnell Park. Its large jungle gym, visible with its bright yellow and white upper structure in the foreground, is a miniature model of the State Capitol, found on the other side of the park.
Golden light, golden buildings, green colors in the park. Flying a drone can unveil a new perspective from an altitude that wouldn’t be accessible otherwise, but it can also just give a boat’s-eye view with a lot less paddling.
In the center of downtown Hartford is the settlement’s first burial ground; the centuries-old gravestones beside modern steel-and-glass buildings is the perfect start to October spookiness.
Calder’s “Stegosaurus” peaks out from the trees between the Wadsworth Atheneum and Hartford City Hall.
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.
Can you spot the Moon hiding in the clouds behind Travelers Tower? Blue hour images like this one used to be a long effort on my part to find my way into and climb to the top of some building… Now, they’re the result of nearly trivial efforts on the part of my drone. Architecture photography really has changed.
Neither the neoclassical architecture nor the rain make this a “peak Batman” image—rather, it’s the interplay of spotlights with fog that creates what I would describe as “Batmanitude”.
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.
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.
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.
Brown concrete, orange late-afternoon light on late-summer clouds, and a general mid-(twentieth-)century vibe.
Decaseconds 