US SUPREME COURT BUILDING

On our recent trip to Washington D.C. we also visited the U.S. Supreme Court building, located behind the U.S. Capitol.  The court was not in session, of course, so all of my shots wound up being basically architectural.  However, the first two are replicas of bas relief sculptures that were located in the building's lower level.  I thought they were features of the frieze in the pediment above the building's main entrance.  Not the case.  So they remain unidentified.  But I liked them for their character, so I kept the images, which I rendered as black & whites.

One of the building's better features is its entrance hallway.  Here are a couple of shots I took looking toward the building's entrance.

Frankly, it was quite dark in the building and I wound up taking these shots (as well as each of the shots below) at f/5.6 for 1/25 second at an ISO of a whopping 4000.  Not too bad, actually.  I thought the individuals in the photos helped to create scale.

At one point we needed to walk down a couple flights of stairs through an arched hallway, and I took the following shots.  The first looking down (with Geri and Tobias, my daughter's fiance, providing perspective).  I thought this had an almost Kafka-esque feel to it.

And the second from the bottom looking back up.

Finally, as we were leaving the building I noticed a sign in a side corridor that said, Spiral Staircase, and I took the following shots, in this case looking up and looking down.

The staircase was cordoned off, so I didn't have access to the floor at the bottom to get the full effect of the spiral stairway.  Instead, I had to lean over a railing to come as close as I could to a central shot.  Also, once I reviewed the last shot in post processing, I noticed that there was a piece of paper lying on the lower level floor.  I managed to remove it in post processing.   I had originally rendered these shots as black & whites, thinking that that would help emphasize the curved lines.  But in the end I stayed with the color, which I thought was quite rich looking.

John