SALT LAKE CITY POTPOURRI

We spent Christmas with our son Jeff and his family in Salt Lake City.  Although I didn't get as much photography time in as I might have, I managed to get out with my camera a few times.  Here is a potpourri of shots that I thought were worth adding to my photo blog.

On one of the first nights there, Jeff and I visited an architecturally interesting pedestrian bridge on the University of Utah campus.  Conditions weren't the best, but I did get one "keeper," sort of.

I hadn't brought my tripod, and in order to get a reasonably fast shutter speed (actually only 1/15th second), I had to increase the ISO setting to a whopping 3200, creating very grainy effect.  It did help, though, to have a few pedestrians in the shot.

Geri and I revisited The Leonardo, a museum in downtown Salt Lake City with something of an identity crisis that we had visited when it first opened a few years ago.  It has elements of both art and technology but doesn't excel in either, although I felt it had included some interesting exhibits when we had visited it the first time.  The problem this time was that it was hosting a traveling Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit that we had visited a couple of years back when it had been in Milwaukee.  Unfortunately, this meant that most of this smallish museum was taken up with the special exhibit that we chose not to revisit, and as a result there wasn't much else to see.  Our visit lasted little more than half an hour, which included time we spent stuck in an elevator, finally pressing an emergency button to get "rescued."  Here are a few of the abstract shots that I did get.

I know, I know, not much.

I also revisited the Utah State Capitol, which I had last visited on our prior trip to Utah in August.  Interestingly, this time I found myself taking shots very similar to those I had taken in the summer.  But most of them weren't quite as good, primarily because the day was very overcast and the light in the building simply wasn't as good as it had been in August.  At least I hope that was the reason.  In any case, I did get a few shots that I thought I would post here.  This first is really quite similar to ones I had taken in August, but I found myself going back to capture the converging arcs that encircle the rotunda ceiling as viewed from the side.

I also took a few photos of some of the statuary on the upper floor walkways, including this of a Native American.

At least I realized that I needed to position the light colored marble against a dark background to ensure that the lines of the statue in profile would stand out.  It also helped to take the shot with the aperture at a wide open f/4.

I did like the following shot of a bronze statue at the building's "back" entrance.  The combination of bluish exterior light and yellowish incandescent interior light helped to make this shot more interesting.

I had seen this shot as a possibility when I first walked into the building but had to wait for two separate wedding parties to finish shooting before I could take the photo.

The staircases at either end of the building are among the most interesting aspects of the capitol's architecture, and I got a number of shots of them, both with and without people.  Here are a couple of the shots sans visitors.

Although the staircase is the focal point for each of these shots, it is the surroundings--the pillars and side corridors in the first shot and the skylight in the second--that I think make these images work.

John