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.

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.

I don’t get to New York as often as I would like to any more. I used to be able to count on at least a couple of trips each year for work, but not so much any more. This particular image was taken a year ago when my wife and I visited New York for our wedding anniversary. It was the first time I had visited the museum and I certainly hope to get back to see it again. It was a cloudy and somewhat rainy day when we visited which meant that the skylight above was mostly white, instead of blue. The interior was not extremely bright, so I had to bump my ISO to 1250 to get a reasonable shutter speed. Unfortunately the camera I was using at the time, an Olympus E-3, doesn’t do well at higher ISO settings. I love the camera, I just wish it did better at higher ISO.