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.

My wife and I spent some time in New York for our anniversary last year. One of the areas we visited was the financial district, particularly the area around the World Trade Center area. This shot was taken in the winter garden portion of the World Financial Center. The day outside was sort of cool and somewhat rainy, but the winter garden was quite nice. When I looked up at the ceiling, I knew I had to get a shot of it.