HDR Photography
When a warm breeze blows across a college campus at twilight, the already gorgeous buildings only become more (pardon the extensive use of cliché) romantic and magical. They tell me that this particular building contains a ghost, but it seems too warm and welcoming (a sort of half-scale college building) to be threatening. Perhaps it contains a friendly ghost?
On a chill and cloudy afternoon, the sky hangs low over Berkeley and Oakland. Highly textured red tile roofs, ionic columns, industrial air handlers, all separated from the “mundane world” by a wall of trees: are these the “layers” of the Berkeley experience?
This was a sight, descending the steps to the courtyard of Latimer Hall, that was once everyday and pedantic to me. Now, the sight of it is a powerfully nostalgic mix of strange perspectives and a dozen mishmashed textures and patterns: tiles and bricks and precast and cast-in-place and trees and bushes. In the long run, that red-green-and-gray color scheme means a lot more to me than I thought it did.
Having recently finished the fantastic Bioshock Infinite, I’ve had images of early-twentieth-century American exceptionalism floating through my brain. No matter what you think of the (sometimes questionable) policy decisions based on such a policy, the iconography is undeniably seductive. Neoclassical design features and waving flags on a crisp Sunday afternoon! Though this moment on St. Lawrence’s campus might not be literally of that time, the spirit of it was overwhelming.
After a (relatively) warm weekend, the North Country is set to be entombed once again in winter. Though we’ve been promised by the false weather prophets that this cold spell won’t match the ferocity of January’s efforts, I can’t help but think back to mornings of almost unreal atmospheric thermal energy. On the edge of St. Lawrence’s campus, the sky was clear and the sun rose and cars puttered to work as though everything was normal.
The ceiling of the gorgeous Hearst Memorial Mining Building demonstrates the drama of designing your building to mimic the dashboard of a steampunk tank. (Oh, was that not their intention?) Though I’ve posted photographs from inside Hearst Memorial Mining Building before (the past site of my co-author’s office), I don’t know that I’ve done justice to its ceiling before. That such rigid, “linear” materials as steel and brick and glass can be formed into such elegant, smooth surfaces continues to astonish me.
Johnson Hall of Science is an unusually green building—particularly for one filled with hoods and hazardous chemicals. It also happens to have a truly surreal geometry that messes with your head a bit, if you let it. The ceilings have been sloped to better reflect daylight, reducing the need for electric lighting. The result is this Alice-in-Wonderland-esque lab space.
I’ve posted before on the strange properties of Berkeley and the Bay Area: the condensation of nature and suburb and weird architecture and intensity urbanity that compresses human interest and life into a tiny area. This high-density material seems to deform the very fabric of space a time, and make the distance of a few miles seem like a light year and the time of a decade seem mere moments. This photograph captures the folding and crinkling as it happens: crunch clouds, sharp trees, an array of buildings from multiple Berkeley colleges within the University, the stretch of Telegraph Ave. and the tiny shapes of Oakland (at the far right) in the distance.
Bit by bit, my memories of Berkeley are vanishing. I can justify that this phenomenon is, at worst, neutral: the daily grind and the stupid time I missed the bus vanish, and only the weekends watching the sunset from the Berkeley Hills remain. Not to be trite: this empty, early-morning, fog-shrouded, post-apocalyptic view of the campanile is now my memory of the place, as well as an operational metaphor for that memory… If that’s not too obtuse.
In a moment of digression from my normal focus on landscapes: I’ve been inspired lately by the street photography of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who captured images of humanity in the “real world.” People living their lives. Perhaps it’s not traditional street photography, but for today’s photograph, I have this shot from Saturday night’s hockey game: SLU vs. Yale. Though the Saints lost, they looked great doing it. The ferocity of this imminent check captivates me.
A “casual blizzard” hit the North Country this weekend, and after I excavated around the house, I went exploring. St. Lawrence’s Zen garden was looking particularly peaceful under its (pardon the cliché) blanket of snow. The tiny structures seem to amplify the effect.
Sometimes, ghosting is a gross byproduct of taking HDR brackets in an imperfect world. Other times, it can be used to create a ghostly Schrödinger’s Cat elevator door, neither closed nor open, forever in flux. Different moments in time and space, overlapped, with brain-twisting results.
Hyperbright hallways in the Energy Biosciences Building come straight from the set of a sci-fi movie. Between labs and storage space are cold room facilities like the one in the foreground of this photo, with its bank of controls on the wall outside. The research accomplished here lives up to the imposing appearance: the future of using biology to harness the Sun’s energy will be born here.
November snow can’t hold the title “unseasonable” in Canton, New York, but it adds a gentle blanket to the campus, just the same. The soft dusk ceiling of pastel clouds and the quiet campus converge at the end of the day.
With dusk arriving earlier and earlier each day, I feel that the time is right to extoll the glory of clouds stretching off to an infinite (or at least periodic) horizon and the first hints of yellows and oranges in the sky matching the hues of the trees.
Decaseconds 