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.

This shot was taken in St. Thomas, USVI on a recent trip. One of the things I was hoping to find was some brightly color boat which would make for an interesting picture. Didn’t find any of those. Instead, what I got was this gritty looking thing. The light was pretty bright and flat but I decided to take the shot anyway just for fun. When I looked through the days shots I wasn’t thrilled with what I had taken, so I decided to work on images that I liked better. After making another pass through those shots I decided to see what could be done with this image. I liked the gritty texture of the boat, especially the way the paint is all chipped and faded. I thought it might be nice to try adding some additional texture to the image through some image overlays.

I’ve always been attracted to images with a strong graphical quality, whether they are color or black and white. When I was wandering around our cruise ship I had my eye out for subjects which might make interesting subjects. This image was taken from a bridge which overlooked the pools on the Freedom of the Seas. The pools have a variety of colored elements which make for interesting visuals. For this shot I simply pointed down at a portion of the pool and attempted to capture an interesting pattern of shape and color.

I took this shot as we walked through one of the alleyways. I liked the strong light on the sign and the shadow it cast on the wall. I also liked the way the sun brought out the texture of the wall. For some reason when I took the shot I decided to shoot it wide. I had a 28-300mm lens on my camera and this shot was taken at 40mm. When I was processing it, however, I decided that the wide shot didn’t really capture the intent that I had when I took it. I was drawn to the signage and the shadows and the wide angle shot didn’t work. In processing, I reworked the crop to focus more on the sign and its shadow.

The island of St. Maarten/St. Martin is an interesting place. Half the island is Dutch, half is French. While visiting there my wife and I took a bus tour around the island which started in Phillipsburg on the Dutch side, and travelled to Marigot, the capital of the French side, and back again. Travel between the two sides is seamless, no more complicated than traveling from one state to another in the US. This shot was taken in an open air market near the waterfront in the town of Marigot. The woman who was running the booth had a large collection of herbs and spices in these bags. It was getting later in the day and I think she was starting to pack up by taking the signs out of the bags which identified the contents. I managed to get this shot before she took these out.

is is another picture I took while on my Caribbean cruise. This is a shot taken in ‘Casino Royale’, the casino on board the Freedom of the Seas. I’m not much of a gambler, although I did play a little video poker while waiting for dinner time and actually ended up ahead by a few dollars. This shot was taken with my new Sigma 15mm fisheye and it shows one of the banks of video poker games in the casino. I thought fisheye might make for an interesting shot.

This picture was taken from the deck of my ship on a recent cruise to the Caribbean. Not much in the way of foreground to make the shot interesting, but I did like the way the sun was lighting the clouds. This image is actually a closer crop from the original. I used my longest lens at 300mm, but the sun was still too small to my liking. I cropped in closer and slightly darkened the exposure to get some more color and a better feeling of sunset light.

When we arrived at Phillipsburg, St. Maarten I saw a sign somewhere claming that the island was the happiest island on Earth. When I saw this sign, I understood why.