HDR Photography
When I added the “Ω” to the title of this image, I imagined endings across multiple dimensions of time: Certainly, a sunset is the end of a day, but I was also thinking on the longer scale of how the slow march of evaporation and desert climate are continuously shrinking the Salton Sea. In a more personal sense, this was likely to be my last visit to the Sea—at least in anything like its current state. All of those combined finalities made this one worthy of being the omega.
While my past approach to photography through aircraft windows was focused on avoiding distracting reflections, the realness of the Artemis II photos—specifically those with astronauts’ hands and faces reflected in spacecraft windows—made me appreciate how the nature of our relationship with Earth though technology can be conveyed. The drama of the American West is more impressive when it’s clear what altitude allowed us to visualize it.
Never has so dramatic a sky of natural beauty been accompanied by so bland a human foreground of golf courses and subdivisions, but that’s the paradox of California for you.
Though even April doesn’t guarantee and escape from blizzards in New England, I’m nonetheless cathartically purging myself of wintery aesthetics, like I.M. Pei’s Bushnell Tower standing proud at the edge of Hartford’s downtown.
Calder’s “Stegosaurus” is an enormous color outlier in the neutral snow color scheme of downtown Hartford.
As we reach the vernal equinox at the precise moment this post goes up, I’m taking a moment to reflect on the end of a long, cold winter in Hartford with some of the images I captured of the experience.
Leaves are long gone, buds have yet to quite emerge, and the colorful display from my earlier picture down Summit Street exists only in that photograph.
Dawn light illuminates the old Indio, California—a farming city of date plantations and strange water projects. In the distance, the oncoming scourge of sprawling subdivisions may signal the end of this particular era.
The bright rooftops in the foreground are L&G Desert Store, a local grocery established in 1979, an ongoing representation of what Indio was during an earlier era, before it was encrusted with subdivisions.
Canada geese clustered around the newly restructured Salt Creek through Fullersburg Woods form an array of little dots and dot-pairs: sitting geese form single blobs, while standing geese make for a dot-pair from a goose and their shadow. It occurs to me that I might analyze the distribution between the two to understand flock dynamics if I weren’t the particular kind of scientist I am.
A sudden morning snow storm followed by incongruously warm day led to an odd quick-melting layer of snow that fanned off of rooftops like the blast visible in the distance.
During the Northeast’s last great storm, I ventured out with my camera to document Hartford’s response and the stillness of the city beneath a layer of sound-absorbing snow.
Cool Rayleigh-scattered blue light, warm also-Rayleigh-scattered sunset light, clean white LEDs reflecting off of snow, deep orange sodium lights—there’s every option visible from above Trinity College’s campus.
Winter rain in Coachella Valley brings deep, somber hues to the monoculture arrays of date palms. I usually aim for depth and variety in my images, with a sense of definite space, so it’s an engaging game to depart from that and focus on a single plane and hypnotic pattern.
Like most infrastructure, a roof is something one generally ignores so long as it is functioning as expected. A heavy melt of snow, however, might call all of that into question. At least the view is good from up here.
Decaseconds 