Renaissance Center Once Again?
by James Howe on Nov.23, 2010, under Detroit
(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 14mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, exposure 1/400 sec @ f/8.0)
Note: This is article is a repost from the early days of this blog. This is one of my favorite images and I’m hoping that new visitors to this blog will enjoy it.
The Renaissance Center in Detroit, Michigan was built in the mid-70’s. At the time, the thought was that this new set of buildings would help provide for a ‘renaissance’ of the city of Detroit. Alas it wasn’t to be. The building was more of a fortress than anything else. It had large berms which faced the main street, and the other side was the river. This created a structure which was more of an island than anything else. A couple years ago, General Motors purchased the buildings and moved it’s world headquarters to it. There was a bit of irony in this, since the Renaissance Center (aka ‘RenCen’) had significant funding from the Ford family.
To GM’s credit, they spent a great deal of money reworking the building. They removed the berms in front which helps open the center up to the rest of Detroit. They improved the interior, which was previously dark and cold. The built a nice atrium in the back, which ties nicely into the Detroit Riverwalk. However, we now have a new irony as it relates to this building. GM is hanging on by a thread financially and may not survive, whereas Ford is doing much better. Perhaps GM will have the last laugh in all of this and will manage to pull through. If so, it may be appropriate that it’s headquarters is in something called the ‘Renaissance Center’.
The image itself was taken on the Detroit edition of Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photowalk. This image was also the winner of the Detroit event, and was one of the top 10 finalists in the entire Photowalk competition. It also managed to wrangle a runners-up mention in the 2008 Photoshop User Awards contest. This shot was taken from the riverfront side of the building. It was late morning so the sun was at a good angle. I was lucky that there were some interesting clouds that day as well. I converted the image to black & white (initially using just Lightroom, but I redid it later in Photoshop) and then added the duo-tone color. The raw image that I started with is shown below. Some additional processing details are described here
Comments and feedback welcome.
Image and text Copyright © 2008-2010 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
This image can be purchased.
Gears
by James Howe on Nov.18, 2010, under Mechanical
(Nikon D700, 70-300 at 70mm, ISO 800, 8 exposure HDR @ f/4.5)
If you have been following my blog for any length of time you should know by now that I enjoy photographing mechanical things. There is something about old, analog technology which I find fascinating. Perhaps it’s the texture of old metal, perhaps it’s the color, and sometimes it’s just the shear size of the thing. This object in this image had all of those things. This picture was taken at theHenry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The museum has a great section of large generators and steam driven machines and every time I visit there I’m drawn to that area. I don’t recall exactly what this picture is showing, I just remember really liking the way the gears looked.
The image was created in Photomatix and Photoshop from 9 different exposures. I did initial processing in Photomatix and did the final work in Photoshop. The Photoshop work included added a bit more micro-contrast with Topaz Adjust, and changing the color just a bit by creating a black and white layer using Silver Efex Pro and backing off on the opacity. The shot below shows a middle exposure from my HDR sequence.
Comments?
[Click the main image to view it in lightbox mode]
Copyright © 2010 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.
Ponce Cathedral – Revisited
by James Howe on Nov.14, 2010, under Architecture
(Nikon D700, 16-35mm at 17mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/1000 sec @ f/8.0)
I had recently posted some black & white images both to my blog as well as Flickr and I received a comment on one of them from one of my Flickr contacts, Gary Easter, an architectural photographer. He mentioned that I might be interested in seeing a portfolio of historical Texas churches that he had put together. I was, and when I view the portfolio I was inspired to take a look at some of my earlier work to see if I could improve on some of my conversions. One of the things that I really like about Gary’s black & white images is the deep blacks and high contrast in some of the images. As I revisited some of my earlier conversions I found a couple that I thought could be improved on. One of those images is the one above the Cathedral Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe of Ponce in Ponce, Puerto Rico.
When I worked on this image, I started from the raw image and reworked things using Silver Efex Pro. The last time I did the conversion I did it by hand in Photoshop. One of the things that I wanted to change was the darkness of the sky. The original image had a nice blue sky and I figured by applying the correct filter I could darken it and get some nice contrast with the clouds. I also selected the ISO 32 Panatomic X film style which seemed to work well with the image. I adjusted the grain settings to get minimal grain, and I adjusted the blue sensitivity to make the sky darker. As with the original image, I also did some perspective correction to straighten the building, but I tried to keep just enough lean to make it look natural. I did some minor cloning of some bright items in the background as well. By way of comparison, here is my first conversion attempt that I posted back in April of this year:
And here is the original shot from which both conversions were taken:
Love to hear you thoughts on this one.
Copyright © 2010 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.
The Lab
by James Howe on Nov.12, 2010, under Greenfield Village
(Nikon D700, 16mm, ISO 3200, Exposure 1/60 sec @ f/8.0)
I was looking through my Lightroom catalog for something to post to the blog when I noticed this shot. Originally I wasn’t excited about it. I liked it, but I didn’t think it was special. Still, there was something about it that I found attractive so I spent a little time with some post processing to see what I might come up with. The shot is from Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park Lab building located in Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. This was pretty much a grab shot as I walked through the building. I bumped the ISO and stuck my camera into this little room and took a couple of shots. I had my tripod, so I could have set up and taken multiple shots for an HDR, but it was getting late in the day and I was getting lazy. I think the thing that appeals to me is what the fisheye does to the lines in the image. I like the strong curve of the doorframe as well as the curved lines created by the paneled walls.
For processing, I initially used Lightroom to reduce the noise in the image. I shot this as 3200 and while the noise wasn’t awful, it was pretty easy to clean up with Lightroom. I then went into Photoshop and used Silver Efex Pro to do the conversion. I again stepped through the presets and came across one that I had created which I call Holga Panatomic X. It’s Nik’s standard Holga preset, which is somewhat dark with a strong vignette, but customized to use the ISO 32 Panatomic X film type. I also added a bit of sepia tone as well. The fisheye creates a nice circular feeling to the image and I think the extra bit of vignette just adds to it and helps bring the focus to the center of the image rather than the edges.
What do you think? Comments always welcome.
Copyright © 2010 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.
Angell Hall – University of Michigan
by James Howe on Nov.11, 2010, under University of Michigan
(Nikon D700, 16-35mm at 16mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/125 sec @ f/16)
This shot is a companion to yesterday’s image showing just the steps of Angell Hall on the campus of the University of Michigan. Not much more to say, really. I really enjoy raking light when it shines across surfaces which create deep shadows. After taking the picture of the steps I switched lenses to my 16-35 so I could get a wider shot. The tree had red/brown leaves which I thought looked good in the sunlight against the stone of the building. I debated about keeping the image in color, but after I played with a black and white version I decided I liked it better.
Processing consisted of a couple different steps. The first thing I did was some fairly radical perspective correction. This involved using the free transform tool in photoshop to do a combination of skew and scale to correct the perspective distortion. Once that was done, I used Silver Efex Pro to try a conversion to black and white. Once again I wanted a fairly high contrast image so I look for a film simulation which gave me a look close to what I wanted. I used a couple of control points to even out some areas of the image and I used a fairly high global structure value which helps bring out details in the stone.
Please feel free to add your comments below.
Copyright © 2010 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.