Guggenheim Museum – NYC
by James Howe on May.09, 2012, under Architectural Details
(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 28mm, Exposure 1/250th sec @ f/11, ISO 200)
On a recent trip to New York City I had the opportunity to spend a little time outside the Guggenheim Museum. It was late in the day and I didn’t have the time to actually go inside so I decided to get some exterior shots. I’ve always been fond of the design of this museum and I wanted to capture some of its details. For me the two things that stand out about this museum is the unique inverted ziggurat he used as the main display area, and the typography used on the exterior lettering. The plain white concrete shapes with the simple black lettering really appeal to me. I was trying to capture something a bit more abstract than just a regular architectural shot so I played with different angles. I liked the angle on this shot, but the image was rather flat coming out of the camera. I used a few different tools in Lightroom 4 to help bring out the texture of the surface and to increase the contrast. Probably the change that had the most effect was bumping the clarity up to 100 while reducing the highlights and blacks. I debated about just making a black and white image, but I wasn’t sure what to do with the bit of blue sky. I didn’t want it dark, and I didn’t want it light so in the end I decided just to keep the bit of blue.
Please feel free to leave any comments or questions you may have about this image below.
Copyright ©2012 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
Chrysler Building – Another View
by James Howe on Apr.30, 2012, under Architectural Details
(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 300mm, Exposure 1/2000th @ f/8.0, ISO 320)
I personally cannot get enough of the Chrysler Building in New York City. I’ve always loved this building and thought that it was far more attractive than the Empire State Building. I’m currently reading a book called “Height – A Race to the Sky and the Making of a City” by Neal Bascomb and it details the history of the building of the Chrysler Building along with 40 Wall Street and the Empire State Building. At the time there was enormous pressure to build the tallest building in the world and its fascinating to read about what went in to making this buildings. I’ve learned several things about the Chrysler Building, one of the more interesting tidbits is that Walter Chrysler funding the building personally, it wasn’t funded by Chrysler Corporation. Clearly the man had plenty of money. I think the things that I love about the Chrysler Building are all the wonderful Art Deco details. The metal work of the Eagles and the replicas of the 1929 Chrysler radiator caps are quite unique and I really like how they architect created the metal crown on top. It’s just a fabulous building.
One of the problems with shooting tall buildings from the street is that certain elements are almost always in shadow. In this case when I was shooting up, the underside of the eagles were in shadow, and the building and sky were quite bright. The raw image managed to capture everything, there were no blown highlights or shadows, but the raw image was just a bit too bright and flat. In Lightroom 4, when I toned down the brightness of the sky and building, the shadows under the eagles blocked up and made it difficult to see the detail. I decided to create a virtual copy of the image and process it for the shadows and then blended the two layers in Photoshop. Once in Photoshop, I also made use of one of my ‘recipes’ to add some additional detail and style to the image. I used a combination of Detail Extractor, Reflector Efex and Levels and Curves to add detail and a bit of color to the image. In the Reflector Efex filter, I used the ‘Soft Gold’ option which is own reason the building is more gold than the silver color you normally associate with the building. In retrospect I probably should have tried the ‘Silver’ option, but I think the gold did a nice job on the sky and creates a unique look to the building itself. I finished things off by cropping out some of the sky, however, because I didn’t think the image needed that much sky.
If you have any comments or feedback, please leave them below. If you happen to be on 500px.com, feel free to stop by there as well to vote on this image, and other images I’ve posted there.
Copyright ©2012 James W Howe – All rights reserved
Atlas – Rockefeller Center
by James Howe on Apr.25, 2012, under New York
(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 70mm, Exposure 1/15 sec @ f/5.6, ISO 800)
Whenever I visit New York City I like to spend some time around Rockefeller Center. I love the Art Deco styling of the buildings and the sculptures. An impressive example of this is the statue of Atlas, which stands directly across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The statue shows Atlas holding up the world and was created by sculptor Lee Lawrie with help from Rene Paul Chambellan. The statue was installed in 1937. I’ve always admired this statue for it’s strong Art Deco style. When I was in New York this time, I wanted to make sure I got a close up of the statue. In close you can really appreciate the detail work that makes the statue so stunning.
Processing occurred mostly in Lightroom 4 with a conversion to black and white using Silver Efex Pro 2. In the original image there were several hot spots on the statue caused by the lighting. With Lightroom 4 (and perhaps because of the D800), I was able to use the highlight slider to remove almost all of the hotspots. If you look at the part of the statue over Atlas’ right shoulder (left side of image) in the original, you will see that there is a big blown out highlight. In the finished image you can actually see detail in that area, all due to the ability to recapture detail from what appeared to be blown out highlights.
If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them below.
Copyright ©2012 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
Food Vendor – Rockefeller Center
by James Howe on Apr.23, 2012, under Travel
(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 125mm, Exposure 1/125th @ f/5.6, ISO 1000)
New York City is full of food vendors, in parts of the city you can’t go a block without seeing one or more. This guy was set up just outside of Rockefeller Center on 5th Avenue. I shot this from the sidewalk as I walked by. Processing was pretty simple. I made a minor rotation correction in Lightroom, did some tweaking of the highlights, contrast etc to adjust the look and add a bit of richness to the image. The biggest change was created by using extreme settings in Clarity and Luminance noise reduction.
The Clarity slider in Lightroom 4 has improved greatly and you can achieve some interesting effects by pushing it to 100. Previously you had to be more careful with Clarity because it could introduce some horrible artifacts. Lightroom 4 is much better. The image was shot at ISO 1000 which had some noise, but the D800 is pretty clean but I wanted to use the noise reduction in a more creative way. By sliding it to almost 100, it imparted a slightly ‘plastic’ look to the shot which I liked.
Feel free to leave any comments or questions below.
Copyright © 2012 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
Metropolitan Life Insurance Building Clock – New York City
by James Howe on Apr.18, 2012, under Architectural Details
(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 250mm – extreme crop, Exposure 1/500 @ f/8.0, ISO 400)
One of the things I love about visiting New York City is all the wonderful architecture. Everywhere you look you can find buildings with interesting shapes and details. This image shows the clock face from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building. You can see from the picture the great detail work put in to creating this clock, details which most people would never see from the street. I especially like the detail work done with the tiles of the clock face.
Producing this image was somewhat interesting. A couple of days ago I posted an alternative version of this image to my New York album. As you can see below, the raw camera shot shows a lot more of the building. The image I posted to G+ cropped things down to showing mostly the clock. I got a question from a viewer asking me about the green color and whether it was copper or something else. I went back to Lightroom and zoomed in to see if I could find out more. When I did, I was surprised at the level of detail found at that level of magnification. (click the image above to view larger) I could see the texture of the individual tiles. I used a rented D800 combined with my 28-300mm lens to take the shot and I’m certainly happy with the details that the 36 megapixels could capture. I decided right then that I wanted to create an image out of this tight crop which is the image you see above.
Please feel free to leave comments below!
Copyright ©2012 James W. Howe – All rights reserved