HDR Photography
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.
An Independence Day special: Fireworks in San Francisco, seen from across the Bay in Berkeley.
The “let’s enhance” action continues with this image of Berkeley’s College of Chemistry, Strawberry Canyon, and South Campus from the top of the Campanile. It holds a special place in my heart because it shows the entire terrain I traversed going to and from work during my first year in grad school.
St. Lawrence’s campus emits white light at night, while Park Street uses orange sodium lamps.
A well-stocked and well-arranged chemistry lab tends to accumulate localized collections of one specific part that wind up looking like a page from a scientific supplies catalog.
The most senior faculty member in St. Lawrence University’s Department of Chemistry is preparing to retire and I selected this image to present to him. (Shhh, keep it a secret for a few more days.) He often looks out from Johnson Hall of Science, the building in the foreground, north towards the older parts of campus (like the chapel spire above the horizon.) In this image, I hopefully captured for him both where he stands and what he sees so that he can take them with him when he goes.
A big, dramatic sky after a fresh snow matches the mood of St. Lawrence’s chapel.
April Fool’s Day played a prank on the reemerging plants of the North Country, dropping ice and snow onto green grass and growing buds.
This is my Schlenk line; there are many like it, but this one is mine. The double-manifold design allows my students and me to expose samples to either vacuum or inert gas (argon, in this case.) Every line has little tweaks and customizations made by the scientist using it, and is thus inevitably a work-in-progress. This particular line very much needs a full-time vacuum gauge as its next addition.
This tiny warm spot near both a vent (for heat) and a downspout (for ample rainwater) continues to have green grass while the rest of the campus is locked beneath a blanket of snow.
The classic winter picture of clean, fresh snow and bright blue skies seems much easier to come by, ironically, under less-wintery conditions near the beginning or end of the season. Under the snow at the edge of the patch in the foreground, you can see that the grass is still green.
In addition to photography, I’ve been exploring 3D printing in the past few years. I’ve found that it’s a great route to making small objects to support my science work. In this case, I was developing a holder to support a 12.7 mm pressed solid sample pellet inside the space normally occupied by a 10-cm pathlength liquid-handling cuvette. The result is this odd rectangular shape that unlocks to hold the “too wide” pellet diagonally—thanks, square root of two!
In these forms, I was working with a variety of materials, including glass-reinforced nylon, lost-wax-cast brass, and a bronze/steel powder combination.
There are plenty of historical reasons (including the original St. Lawrence University’s acquisition of the adjacent agricultural college), but the clustering of the school’s STEM-focused buildings on one side of campus—the arts/humanities at the other extreme and most of the social sciences in the middle—has resulted in a literal mapping of the academic spectrum onto physical space.
St. Lawrence’s chapel is filled with the flags of many nations, but they look even better when paired with a crowd of people—hopefully someday again.
The campus previously lay fallow under a winter break snow crust, but we once again (just as in August) successfully managed to safely return the students to campus for another semester at St. Lawrence University.
