Madrid Obligatorio

In December, our transatlantic flight to New York turning back near Greenland, spending hours in the air with an unknown mechanical error for returning us to the Madrid-Barajas Airport. After an all-too-brief but restless night in a mediocre Spanish hotel, we were back at the airport early the next morning for a second (and ultimately successful) attempt at an Atlantic crossing. Several hundred people waited to board. I looked out at the horizon; the landscape was strange, alien, surreal, but ultimately a lot more welcoming than the cold dark of the North Atlantic. The image will stay with me.

Madrid Obligatorio

Gentle Light on Travelers Tower

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.

Gentle Light on Travelers Tower

Long Walk After Snow

Despite any efforts to the contrary, nostalgia sneaks into my life at moments I least expect. Trinity’s Long Walk was my undergraduate home for several years and this particular moment—a winter evening, as the sun goes down and the smell of dinner cooking in the dining hall climbs aboard the surprisingly warm breeze—was so evocative of the experiences that made me fall in love with campus 20 years ago.

Long Walk After Snow

Radiates Through the Chapel

Trinity College’s chapel is a beautiful piece of twentieth-century neo-Gothic architecture, but the interaction with the sunset sky brought a whole new appreciation for the structure. The gold light of the sky comes through the open belfry, but electrical lighting elements that shine up the structure from beneath the belfry happened to also match the sunset color and the position along the horizon, producing the odd trompe l’oeil of the structure appearing to allow the viewer to see through the mountains in the distance to even more sky beyond.

Radiates Through the Chapel

Cold Dawn Nucleation

There’s some sang about the photographer, not the camera, mattering to a great shot; while I appreciate the value of having the right tools, this sunrise image captured in a quick moment with my phone on a 1ºF morning provides some evidence to support the theory. The low temperatures quickly nucleated ice crystals from towers across the city and produced this dramatic array of miniature clouds.

Cold Dawn Nucleation