Flatiron Building – New York City
by James Howe on Mar.16, 2011, under Architecture
(Olympus E-3, 7-14mm at 10mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, Exposure 1/160 sec @f/6.3)
Most people viewing this blog probably recognize this building as the Flatiron Building in New York City. In fact, the real name of the building is the Fuller Building. The building was constructed in 1902 as the headquarters for the Fuller Company, a prominent construction company. The building has a fascinating history as detailed in the book The Flatiron by Alice Sparberg Alexiou. The book describes the interesting backstory to the construction of the building and of the development of New York City in general.
I’ve been to New York a few times, mostly on business, and I’ve always wanted to get a picture of this iconic building. I finally did get a chance to visit this part of New York and I tried to get some nice shots of the building, but when I reviewed the images later I wasn’t really thrilled with what I had captured. The weather was overcast, the lighting was drab and most of my compositions didn’t really work out as well as I thought they would when I was taking the shots. I didn’t have the opportunity to go back and take some additional shots so I decided to work with what I had. I did have one shot which I sort of liked and I’ve actually been working with it off and on since I took the picture back in October of 2009 and the finished result is what you see above.
A couple of my favorite shots of the Flatiron are by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Both images have a sort of hazy, foggy quality that I really like. I wasn’t trying to recreate these images, but I did use them for inspiration.
My processing involved a few steps but nothing really major. The first thing I did was to correct the perspective distortion created by my wide angle lens. I didn’t shoot exactly parallel to the building so there was some tilt. I used free transform with skew and scale to get something that I thought looked right. I then tried to pull out a bit more contrast in the image. I then used Topaz Adjust on the Clarity preset to bring out more detail. I then added some additional sky to the top of the image. A later step was going to trim some off the top and I didn’t want to clip the building. I then used Silver Efex Pro 2 to do an initial conversion. I increased the structure setting to bring out some detail in the clouds which was hidden. I took this image into Photo Tools and actually added a bit of a blue tone. I liked the bluish cast, but the image was too bright. I decided to take it back in to Silver Efex Pro 2 and perform another pass. This time I used one of the presets which darkened the image, increased the graininess and added the burned borders. I think it is a nice improvement over the original image, seen below.
(click either image to see it in lightbox mode)
Feedback and comments are always welcome. Simply leave them below.
Copyright © 2009-2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.
Guggenheim #2
by James Howe on Mar.14, 2011, under Architecture
(Olympus E-3, 7-14mm at 8mm (2x crop factor), ISO 125, Exposure 1/200 sec @f/6.3)
This seems to be the time of year when I take a look through pictures I’ve shot in the past but never did anything with. Some of this is due to the fact that I haven’t really had the time or the motivation to go out and shoot new material. Some of it is just the simple fact that I like to browse my catalog for images which might be interesting to work with. The raw image that I took of the Guggenheim Museum in New York was not going to be one of those images. I didn’t particularly care for the composition, I didn’t like all the people in the shot, it just didn’t thrill me. So it was somewhat of a surprise to me that I picked this image to experiment with.
I started out thinking I would try some perspective correction and some black and white work just to see where things might end up. I wanted to emphasize the texture of the building and wanted to get some interesting black and white tonalities. I took the image into Silver Efex Pro2 and ran through some of the presets. I settled on one of the presets which created a dark, but toned image with some edge vignetting. I didn’t want the toning, so I removed that. I also bumped up the structure to bring out more of the concrete surface. The end result was an image which sort of looked like a charcoal drawing. The image was a little flatter than I wanted, so I used curves to brighten the whites and darken some of the dark areas. I used Topaz Simplify to blur out the people in the bottom of the image, masking out the effect from the building. I then played with a couple of crops. The first thing I tried was a square crop, highlighting the ramp portion of the building. I wanted to look at some portion of the image and zoomed in. It was at that point that I saw a different crop, one which eliminated more of the bottom and gave a more elongated feel to the shot. The end result is what you see above.
Love to hear you thoughts on this, leave them in the comments below. Thanks!
Copyright © 2009-2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.
Museum
by James Howe on Mar.13, 2011, under Architecture
(Olympus E-3, 7-14mm at 14mm (2x crop factor), ISO 125, Exposure 1/200 sec @f/6.3)
I’ve always been a fan of great architecture and at one time was planning on becoming an architect. I didn’t follow that career path, but my love of architecture remains. One of my favorite architects is Frank Lloyd Wright. I think his work was always imaginative and often times groundbreaking. I’ve visited several of his structures and the one thing that always surprises me is the actual size of the building. I will have seen pictures of some building or house and have an image in my mind of how big the thing should be, but when I actually get a chance to see the structure, it’s always smaller than I expected. A couple of years ago I was finally able to visit the Guggenheim Museum in New York and I felt the same way. The musuem sits along Central Park and spans the width of one city block, but the Wright designed portion of the museum is not imposing at all from the outside.
The picture you see above was taken from right out front with a wide angle lens. One of the distinguishing features of the Guggenheim is the spiral ramp which is used for exhibition space, and the spiral is completely visible from the outside. I wanted to capture this feature as well as the interesting typography used for the museum lettering. When I was processing the image, I wanted to create an image which looked more like an abstract design for poster than an actual photograph. Processing involved painting black in the sky and underneath the building overhang, and using curves layers to darken and lighten other portions of the image. While the image was mostly black and white even in the color version, the ‘whites’ were a little blueish so I converted the image to black and white using Silver Efex Pro 2
Love to know what you think. Please leave any thoughts or comments below.
Copyright © 2009-2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.
The Artist
by James Howe on Mar.08, 2011, under New York
(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 40mm (2x crop factor), ISO 250, Exposure 1/13 sec @f/4)
The image above is another picture that I took on a trip to New York in late 2009. My wife and I were visiting to celebrate our wedding anniversary. It was fall and the weather wasn’t particularly nice, so we spent some time in the Guggenheim and Metropolitan Museum of Art. We were walking through the Met when I saw this gentleman working on his own work of art. He was so still and quiet he almost appeared to be a work of art himself.
Processing was fairly straight-forward. A conversion to black and white using Silver Efex Pro 2 with some added vignetting. I had experimented with using Topaz Simplify to make this image look more like a painting/drawing to sort of match the subject matter, but in the end I decided to go with something more basic.
Thoughts?
Copyright © 2009-2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.
Lamp
by James Howe on Mar.07, 2011, under black and white
(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 19mm (2x crop factor), ISO 400, exposure 1/160 sec @ f/4.0
For some reason I’ve had this image sitting in a blog posting which was never published. I must have started to create a posting and then got distracted. Anyway, I finally decided to go ahead and publish this shot. The image shows a lamp which was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The lamp was part of an exhibit on design. I took this picture a couple of years ago so I don’t know if the exhibit is still there or if it was a temporary thing. The thing I liked about the lamp was the geometry. I liked the band of alternating black and white rings of the base and the interesting light shade. Of course, the coolest thing is the pattern it creates on the wall when the light is on.
When I took the shot there was no doubt that this would be a black & white image. The lamp itself was black and white and only appears yellow in the raw shot because of the lighting and my lack of white balance adjustment. Processing involved using a Black & White adjustment layer in Photoshop along with some curves adjustments. I finished it off by creating a film grain layer and doing a minor crop to make the base touch the bottom and sides of the image.
Comments and feedback welcome.
Image and text Copyright © 2009-2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved