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.

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’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 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.

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.

I was working through my Lightroom catalog this morning trying to find some shots that I had edited recently. I wanted to export them so I could print them. As I was working through the catalog, I came across an image of two trains that I had taken in the summer of 2007. I had produced a final image that I liked at the time, but when I saw it today I thought I might tweak it a little to come up with something different.

I haven’t had a lot of spare time recently to go out and do a lot of shooting, so I’ve been spending some time going over my Lightroom catalog and looking at images that I may have overlooked before, or for ones that I might want to try some different processing on. This image is one of the former. The shot shows the Rackham Building and the newly constructed North Quad dormitory on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I took this picture last May on a bright, sunny Sunday morning. I had wanted to get some shots of the new dorm as well as see what other interesting things I could find. This picture was taken right after I got out of my car. The sun was behind me and creating some nice hard light on the Rackham Building. I also liked the bit of North Quad which was in the frame. Since North Quad was still under construction, there was a fence around the building and the angle on this shot pretty much hides all of the construction related things surrounding the building at that time.

his image is another one from my personal snowstorm photowalk that I took a couple of weeks ago. The picture was taken in the University of Michigan Law Quadrangle during a brief, but intense snowstorm which lasted a few hours. The building in the background is one of the buildings which comprise the buildings known as the Lawyers Club. The Law Quad has an interesting history. The buildings were all funded from a law school alumuns, William Cook, who requested that the school be built in a design reminiscent of Cambridge University. Construction of the Law Quad took place between 1924 and 1933. Mr Cook never saw the completed school.

This image is not my usual style, I sort of took it on a whim. I had gone out to shoot some shots of the University of Michigan campus during a snowstorm and I had just parked my car and was getting my gear ready. I popped my lens on and decided to fire off a quick shot looking out the windshield of my car. Just a quick grab shot and that I wasn’t really expecting much from. A few weeks after I too this, I noticed it in my Lightroom catalog and I thought it looked sort of interesting. Given the somewhat abstract nature of the shot, I knew this had to be black and white. A simple conversion using Silver Efex Pro and a bit of sharpening and I ended up with my final image.

couple of weeks ago I ventured over to the west side of MIchigan in search of something different to shoot. I found some interesting subjects and headed back home. I hadn’t had any lunch, so on the way home I decided to stop and get some food. The weather was kind of snowy and the roads were a bit of a mess so my intention was to get a quick lunch and head back on to the highway. I saw a sign for a fast food restaurant so I thought I would get off and grab a bite to eat. Normally these restaurants are right at the exit so you can get off, eat and get back on. However, when I got off at this particular exit, I found out that the restaurant was about 5 miles north of the highway. I debated for a bit about just getting back on and going to the next location, but finally decided to just put in the little extra time since I was already off the highway. On my way up the road I passed by this old church. I thought it had some interesting character so I decided after I had my lunch I would come back and take some shots.