This shot shows some of the details of the Lenawee County Courthouse that was the subject of yesterday’s post. I shot this from directly in front of the building using my 70-300mm lens. Some of the key details are the patterns in the roofing shingles, the terra cotta reliefs and all the curves and arches.

With springtime comes the opening of the Gilmore Car Museum, a great car museum located between Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, Michigan. The museum has a great collection of automobiles from virtually any time period. In addition to their regular displays, they also hold various car shows on their grounds. This shot was taken late last spring at the 2010 Classic Car Collectors of America (CCCA) show. This show features a wonderful collection of wonderfully restored classic automobiles. This particular image shows the interior of a 1940 Packard Touring Sedan.

This is a shot of the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I drive by this church frequently, and I’ve always liked the way it looks when the sun is shining on it in the afternoon. I’m a big fan of contrast and the sharp angles of the building combined with the angle of the sun creates an interesting look.

On my way to visit my parents a few days ago I noticed this old windmill at a nearby farm. I don’t know what it is, but I really like old machinery, especially if it is rusty or crusty, so I had to stop and take a few pictures. None of the shots were particularly outstanding, but I liked this one the best of the lot. I initially thought about leaving this as a color image since I like the color combination of the rusty orange and the blue sky, but in the end I went with an antique sepia toned look courtesy of Silver Efex Pro.

his image start life as an 8 shot HDR. The subject is one that I’ve visited many times, an old schoolhouse west of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’ve worked on a couple variations of this shot. One was a straight color HDR, a second was a simpler black and white conversion of the color HDR and finally this version. In all cases the thing I liked the most was the clouds in the sky. My original black and white conversion created a reasonably dark sky which looked pretty nice but I decided to go for a more antique look with this version. To me it looks like the sort of image that appeared on old stereoscope cards. I used to love to use my grandparents viewer to look at their cards in wonderful 3D and perhaps that’s why I like the way this image came out.

With a turn to nicer weather yesterday, I decided to go out for a drive to look for interesting subjects to shoot. I was sort of in the mood for things old and rusty, but I didn’t really come across anything which struck my fancy. Heading home, I drove by an old train depot in Saline, Michigan which has been converted to a historical museum. I have driven past this location many times and had never paid it much attention. On this day, however, I noticed a couple of cool elements, one of which was this large wooden windmill. This is a 10ft diameter windmill which is similar to an 18ft windmill which was originally installed at the site. According to the museum’s web site, “The Eclipse was once the most popular of all wooden windmills. It was painted an unusual shade of red and green, colors described by windmill writer, T. Lindsay Baker, as “cow patty green with buzzard blood red tips.” All I know is that I liked the pattern created by the blades. Even though the color is unique, I decided to go with black & white to draw the eye to the patterns rather than the color.

After posting yesterday’s image, I took another look at the raw shot and thought that there were some things that I could do with the original orientation that would also make for a more interesting shot. The horizontal shot I posted yesterday is more focused on the person, whereas the taller shot I think does a better job of showing the person in the context of the surrounding architecture. I used Silver Efex Pro2 to convert to black and white and to add a vignette and sepia tone. I think the vignette helps draw the eye to the person, while still being able to see a larger context.

ometimes a crop can make all the difference in an image. The image you see above was taken in the new wing of the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). I was trying to capture the classic ‘musuem’ shot which shows someone contemplating some piece of art. As I walked through the gallery, I noticed this gentleman standing and looking at something and I liked the way he was framed by the walls of the museum. For some reason I decided to shoot this vertically. I think I was captivated by all the angles and lines which were captured by the wide angle lens. However, the vertical nature of the shot was more about architecture than the person. As I looked at the image, I wondered what it might look like if I had shot it horizontal, so I tried a relatively severe crop to convert from vertical to horizontal. I liked what I saw so I did a fairly simple conversion to black and white and the result is what you see above.

In my previous post I mentioned that the image I posted was not the one I was originally planning on posting. My original thought was to post this shot of the grille of the 1932 Bucciali TAV 12 and include the shot of the full car as additional reference to let the viewer see what the entire car looked like. Since I posted the full view, I figured it was time to post the detail shot.

As you can see, processing was fairly simple. Some minor cropping and a conversion to black and white to emphasize the look of the chrome on black.

On my last trip to New York (too long ago), my wife and I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a rainy Sunday and the museum was quite crowded. This was my first time visiting the museum and I really enjoyed shooting some interior shots. Unfortunately the camera I had at the time wasn’t great at higher ISO values. I took several shots of the main entry area, but many of them ended up being blurry because the exposures were too long. My camera had image stabilization which did help me hand hold some shots at slower speeds, but too many shots still ended up being useless. The one you see below was a borderline image. I liked the composition with the arches and the skylights and for the most part the image was fairly sharp. I finally spent a little time with it to see what I might be able to come up with.