I was looking through my Lightroom catalog trying to find images which might be fun to play with using the Silver Efex Pro plugin I just purchased. As I scanned across the folders, I found a series of images that I had taken at the Michigan Central Depot in Detroit, Michigan. The building is famous for both its beauty and sorry condition. It has been threatened with demolition, and yet it still stands. Several movies have been shot here and it is a popular place for urbex photographers to visit.

I’ve been doing black and white conversions in Photoshop for some time now, but I’ve always been interested in the results I’ve seen from Nik’s Silver Efex Pro plugin. Well, I finally took the plunge and purchased it. As a quick test of the software I decided to try it out on an image I had been playing around with.

The picture shows the Greyhound bus depot in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The depot itself was built around 1940 in the Streamline Moderne style. I’ve always enjoyed the look of this building, although its a shame that it hasn’t been kept in better shape. I took this picture on an early morning walk I made around town a couple of months ago.

My wife and I spent some time in New York for our anniversary last year. One of the areas we visited was the financial district, particularly the area around the World Trade Center area. This shot was taken in the winter garden portion of the World Financial Center. The day outside was sort of cool and somewhat rainy, but the winter garden was quite nice. When I looked up at the ceiling, I knew I had to get a shot of it.

I don’t get to New York as often as I would like to any more. I used to be able to count on at least a couple of trips each year for work, but not so much any more. This particular image was taken a year ago when my wife and I visited New York for our wedding anniversary. It was the first time I had visited the museum and I certainly hope to get back to see it again. It was a cloudy and somewhat rainy day when we visited which meant that the skylight above was mostly white, instead of blue. The interior was not extremely bright, so I had to bump my ISO to 1250 to get a reasonable shutter speed. Unfortunately the camera I was using at the time, an Olympus E-3, doesn’t do well at higher ISO settings. I love the camera, I just wish it did better at higher ISO.

For the past few days I’ve been playing with a Nikon 24mm PC-E lens. I like to shoot architecture and I thought it would be fun to try a lens which would let me do some perspective correction in camera rather than in Photoshop. I still have a lot to learn about using this lens, but I really like it (which I could afford one). This shot of the new North Quad dormitory on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor was taken with this lens. I was lazy and shot this hand held. With a 24mm lens I was able to capture most of the building without tilting the camera too much, and then I used the shift capability to reduce any keystoning. The nice thing about being able to do this optically is you keep the full resolution of the image rather than stretching/compressing pixels in Photoshop.

One of the things I like to do in my spare time is wander around the University of Michigan campus looking for photo opportunities. It’s particularly nice in the late spring and summer when the students are away. Recently on one of my walks I took this shot of Burton Tower. I have a thing for high contrast and raking light and I liked how the sun was shining on the tower. I really would have preferred to take this shot from a higher point, but I didn’t have access to one so I simply backed up about as far as I could and then zoomed in on the upper portion of the tower.

The image above shows Two Lads Winery located on Old Mission Peninsula near Traverse City, Michigan. The tall glass area is the tasting room which has a wonderful view of the east arm of Grand Traverse Bay. The grounds around the building were rather plain and gave the image more of a snapshot look. Ideally I would have liked to take this shot just after sunset, but when you are on vacation you shoot what you can when you can.

This image shows the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As you might be able to guess, the original photograph was ‘tweaked’ just a bit. My original plan was to do some perspective correction, minor cropping and curves adjustments to create a reasonable architectural image. One idea I had was to create both dark and light versions of the image and create a single image HDR just to see what it would look like. As I worked on creating the darker image I found that I liked the pattern that was being created by the tree on the main wall of the museum. I decided to see what things would look like if I really pushed the blacks. With some additional work in Lightroom, including cropping, I took the image to Photoshop where I painted over some light spots which existed in the black expanses of the building.

My family and I just returned from a short vacation in Puerto Rico. We stayed in the San Juan area, but we took a trip to the south side of the island where we visited the city of Ponce. Ponce was an interesting experience because non of my family speaks Spanish (we can read some) and there was very little English spoken in Ponce. We didn’t have a good map of Ponce and the city has very tight streets. We spent some time in the town square where I took this picture of the Ponce Cathedral. The church itself is on the National Register of Historic Places as “Cathedral Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe of Ponce”.

This image shows one of the galleries in the new wing of the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I really like the clean architecture of the new wing, very modernist. The new wing does a nice job of showcasing modern art.