One of the joys of visiting New York City is the wonderful architecture of its buildings, both old and new. One of my favorite buildings in New York is the Chrysler Building, and one of the main reasons I like it so much is all the wonderful Art Deco details used in its design. Nothing is more iconic that the metal top which adorns this building. I took this shot on the last day of a recent trip to New York. I wasn’t able to get a nice night shot, so I worked with what was available. I was using my 28-300 lens on a rented D800 and I took numerous shots of the building from various angles. What I really wanted was an extreme close-up, but by the time you get far enough away from the building to have a nice angle on the top, even 300mm doesn’t get you very close. What I ended up doing for this shot was to crop a section out of larger image to get the detail that I wanted. Fortunately I was shooting with a rented D800 which has 36 megapixels to work with. Even after a very tight crop the image is still quite large and detailed.

I have a trip to New York City coming up soon and I’ve been going through some past images that I’ve taken in New York to get some ideas about what I might want to shoot on this trip. I came across this shot that I took of the Atlas statue located in Rockefeller Center, just across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I’ve worked on this image before but never really came up with something I really liked. I’ve tried various things to remove the extra buildings since I wanted the focus to be on Atlas and the cathedral across the street. I tried something new this morning. I used a couple filter in Color Efex Pro4 to bring out some detail in the shot and increase color saturation, and then I used a Film Noir preset in Silver Efex Pro 2 to convert the image to black and white. I made some additional adjustments and came up with the final image. I think it has a nice almost hand-drawn character to it. It’s not perfect, but I think it came out all right.

This shot shows the old generator building for the Peninsula Paper Company of Ypsilanti, Michigan. The company closed years ago and the factory was demolished to make way for some apartments. I shot this shot of the old hydroelectric generator building from the site of the old paper factory. It was late in the day and I tried to get to this location before the sun set.

This image shows the Michigan Central Station in Detroit from the carriage entrance side. The shot was taken from the back side of the building, close to where the tracks came in to the building. Carriages used to drop off or pick up passengers from under the metal structure.

I’ve been finding it difficult to get out and shoot new material for a variety of reasons, but today was such a nice day I decided to make an effort to get out and at least shoot something. I decided to take a short drive into Detroit to check out the progress on the Michigan Central Station. The owners are finally doing something to at least stabilize the building. Mostly this involves tightening security around the station to keep people out, removing the broken windows and putting in new windows, and working on the roof. Progress is slow, but they have definitely made some progress at least regarding the windows on the lower level. They haven’t actually replaced any that I could see, but they have removed the broken glass.

I was going through some images this morning looking for something to post on my Google+ account for the SacredSunday theme when I came across a picture I had taken of the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had previously done a black & white conversion that I previously posted to my blog. I recently added Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 4 to my toolkit and I was just curious as to what I might be able to do using that plugin.

This is a shot taken recently in Chelsea, Michigan home to Chelsea Milling, makers of Jiffy Mix and also the home town of Jeff Daniels, whose family owns Chelsea Lumber Company. The main subject in this shot is the Clocktower, which was built by the Glazier Stove Company which once operated the worlds largest oil stove factory on the site. The Clocktower building was once the tallest structure in Washtenaw County. The tower served the dual purpose of holding a 20,000 gallon (76,000 liter) water tank for fires and for keeping time. While the Clocktower no longer serves as a water tower, but the old water tank is still encased within the tower just below the clock faces.

This is a shot of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City that I took a couple of years ago. It’s actually a panorama created from three shots (the original pano is shown below). I’ve actually been working on variations of this image since I took it. I’ve played around with a variety of ideas. I recently purchased theTopaz Labs Detail plugin and I experimented with it on this image.

On a recent trip to northern Michigan, my wife and I visited Traverse City Commons. I’ve posted shots from this location before. The site is the location of the old Northern Michigan Asylum where they are converting the old buildings into retail, office and residential spaces. The weather the morning we arrived was cloudy, but breaks were beginning to appear in the clouds. As the sun peaked through it shone on the roof tops and really highlighted the towers/cupolas that are a key feature of the main building.

My wife and I are spending some time in Northern Michigan, including Mackinac Island situated between Michigan’s lower and upper peninsulas. The island has a great collection of summer ‘cottages’, most of which are really large homes. They were generally built by wealthy industrialists and needed to accommodate family and servants. A nice example of a typical Mackinac Island cottage is ‘Brigadoon’ shown above. This cottage has a wonderful view of Mackinac Island’s harbor.