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.

Today’s image was not the image that I was planning on posting today. I have another shot of this car, a detail shot of this 1932 Bucciali TAV 12, which I was going to post. I was simply going to clean up the full length shot of the car to give viewers an opportunity to see what the entire car looked like. The picture was taken at the 2010 Concours d’Elegance held at Meadowbrook Hall in Rochester Hills, Michigan. The show always features a terrific collection of classic automobiles both common and rare. This car was parked under a tree and was the first car people saw when the entered the grounds. Lots of people were surrounding the car so it was difficult to get a clean shot. I never really thought I would do anything with this picture, but as I started to make changes, I started to like it more and more.

This is a shot of a 1956 Thunderbird Convertible taken at the 2010 Motor Muster held annually at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Processing on the image was fairly minimal. I created more of a square crop to focus on the window ports and I used a curves layer to darken the image a bit and add some additional contrast. I used a HSL layer to remove the blue sky reflection from the chrome and then applied a little vignette in Lightroom.

Here’s something different, an image in color! I’ve had this post sitting in draft stage for some time and I finally decided to publish it. No reason for the delay, it just got ignored for some reason. The picture was taken while my family was on on vacation in Puerto Rico last year. It shows one of the two forts in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico known as ‘El Morro’ officially named ‘Fort San Felipe del Morro’ When I took the shot there was a boy sitting on the grass and I thought he added a bit of interest to the shot. Unfortunately I think he’s a bit too small to really have much impact on the picture, particularly in a smaller image.

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.

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.