This image shows some of the wonderful architectural work done by Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago’s Rookery Building. The building was built by Daniel Burnham and John Root and completed was completed in 1888. At the time it was one of the most expensive and largest commercial buildings in Chicago. The building’s name comes from a nickname given to the area prior to the construction of the building. The area had been home to Chicago’s temporary city hall and a water tank and had been called ‘the rookery’ because of the birds that nested there as well as the probability of being ‘rooked’ by the local politicians.

My wife and I had an opportunity to visit the Chicago area recently. We were in town for a tour sponsored by the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust” called ‘Wright in Racine’. The trip took us to Racine, Wisconsin where we were able to tour Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Wingspread”, the home for Herbert Johnson of S.C. Johnson Wax, as well as the Johnson Wax Administration Building. After the tour we spent some additional time in the city of Chicago. One of the great places to visit in Chicago is the Art Institute of Chicago. This museum houses a great collection of art. While we were visiting, I noticed this shot looking out of the museum toward Millenium Park. The way the lights were hanging and the way the windows were shaped, I was reminded of the leaded glass windows that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed for the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo, New York. The windows had a pattern that Wright called ‘The Tree of Life’. With a bit of a crop, this shot from the museum reminded me of those windows.

This image shows the interior of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1959, the museum is unique in its use of a spiral ramp to lead patrons through the exhibited items. To view an exhibit you take an elevator to the top and walk down the ramp. It’s an interesting museum and I highly recommend a visit if you are in New York City.

I’ve been viewing an online photography course called Photoshop for Photographers, taught by Ben Willmore and presented on creativeLIVE.com. I’ve been using Photoshop for years and have view many tutorials and read various books and articles. Still, watching this course gave me some deeper understanding of how to make the most of Photoshop along with learning some new techniques that I hadn’t tried before. One of the areas that I found interesting dealt with retouching images, especially how to best make use of the Clone Stamp, Spot Healing Brush and the Healing Brush. I decided to look for some images in my catalog that I could practice on and I came across this image of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City that I had taken a few months ago.

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.