HDR Photography
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.
When an autumn day at St. Lawrence University ends with a storm above the Adirondacks, those horizon raindrops scatter warm hues back to the quadcopter camera.
Students tell me that St. Lawrence’s campus reminds them of Narnia, and I have to admit I find the comparison particularly apt on snowy Saturday mornings when it’s time to get an egg sandwich.
As I did in the past, I captured a time sequence of views of St. Lawrence University’s Payson and Piskor Halls (with the ultimate goal of making a dynamic desktop for macOS.) A steady tripod and a very large lens skirt made this possible.
I: Morning
II: Late Afternoon
III: Sunset
IV: Blue Hour
V: Night
VI: Dawn
Unlike the generally empty dorms of St. Lawrence over winter break, Sykes is home to many of our international students who remain on campus. The traditional architecture seems natural under a crust of ice, with a sort of “Harry Potter staying at Hogwarts” vibe.
Though St. Lawrence’s students are arriving to campus in a safety-mandated trickle over the next few weeks instead of a single-day flood, there’s still a sense of the snow-blanketed halls coming back to life. I love the energy of a college campus in full swing.
This post represents a big moment for me: the first image from my new Sony α7R IV. This is only the third serious digital camera; my first was a Nikon D3100, and I’ve been shooting primarily with a D7000 for the past eight years. The capabilities from a decade of technological advancement and the engineering switch to a mirrorless design have pretty-well blown my mind. I really recommend clicking through to Flicker to look at this image at full scale—the tiny pinpricks of each star, the details in the windows of every building. The 61-MP capabilities of the α7R IV maybe be considered overkill by some, but I’m finding it to be the perfect tool for the kinds of “zoom in forever”-detailed photographs that I love to produce.
Bob-Ross-ian “happy little trees” may look their best in autumn, but I’m not sure they’re at their happiest while heading into dormancy.
A big view of a little building: St. Lawrence University’s Herring Cole Reading Room. Though it was once a library, it’s now the best study space on campus.
Decaseconds 