The last four hours of the day

"Henry Moonshine." (Oliver Braubach Photo)

Oliver Braubach suffers for his art. Wanting to get some shots of Dalhousie in the winter, the PhD student left the comparative neurobiology laboratory in the Tupper Building late at night with his camera slung over his neck.

The last four hours of the day: A photo essay.  

With night classes over and most students snug at home, the Dalhousie campus late at night was still and strangely beautiful. Freezing rain had encased tree branches in icy sleeves and made the snow crunchy to walk on. In the moonlight, everything was glistening: benches, sidewalks, buildings.

“I love this tree,” he says, regarding his otherworldly photograph “Cubus,” a shot he took that night of a crystallized tree and the Killam Library looking like a Borg ship from Star Trek.

“In the daytime, you’d walk past that tree without even noticing it, but at night in the cold it looks awesome,” he says. “But I really paid for it the next day. I faced the elements and they clobbered me.”

A native of Liechtenstein, Mr. Braubach plays with elements of light and dark in these photographs. He’s perfected a technique in which he digitally combines multiple exposures of each image taken at various shutter speeds.

“There are a lot of nice places at Dalhousie. It’s a beautiful campus,” he says. “I guess I’m presenting it a little bit differently.”