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.

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.

This image shows the entrance to the Arcadia Theater. I really liked the color and deco design elements of this theater. Taking pictures on the ship was a challenge for me. There were so many bright surfaces and so many lights the final images just seemed to come out too busy. I tried a couple different attempts at processing this image and at some point I decided to try using Topaz Simplify just to eliminate some of the extraneous reflections and focus more on the color and design elements of the theater entrance.

I’ve been posting a lot of grungy, dark images the past few days and I decided it was time to do something a little more colorful. I took this shot in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2009 and its been sitting in my ‘blog possibilities’ collection for a while so I decided to trot it out. The image shows the Acme Mercantile store on Liberty Street. The store has all sorts of interesting items for sale. I took this shot on a walk I took around town focusing primarily on using my ultra-wide angle lens (7-14 Digital Zuiko 2x crop factor). The image was produced as an HDR from 5 exposures, with some additional processing.

Here’s another shot to show you that not everything in Saginaw is in a decaying state. This building is known as ‘The Castle’ and currently houses the Saginaw Castle Museum, a museum dedicated to the history of Saginaw County. The building was built originally as a U.S. Post Office. According to some information I found on the web, the post office was built in 1897 as part of a government program to make government buildings reflect the history of the town where they were built. In this case, the post office was created to look like a French chateau to reflect the fact that the city of Saginaw was established by French Voyageurs. Apparently this government program was too expensive (gee, you think) and was scrapped after the first building was completed. This building sits right behind the Hoyt Library.

‘ve shown several images from Saginaw which show things in various states of decay. However, not everything in Saginaw is falling apart. Saginaw was, and still is, home to many buildings of architectural significance. One of those is the Hoyt Public Library building. In 1882, Jesse Hoyt of New York bequeathed $100,000 to East Saginaw for the construction of a library. While an early design was done by Henry Hobson Richardson (he of ‘Richardsonian Romanesqe architecture fame) the final design was altered and executed by Van Brunt & Howe (no relation that I know of). The library was built in 1887. An expansion (seen on the right) was done in 1960 and was designed by the father of my best friend.