MILWAUKEE EVENING SCENES

On  a sultry evening a couple of days ago, I took my camera downtown Milwaukee to take advantage of the evening light.  My first stop was the Milwaukee Art Museum.  I took a number of shots in the hour before sunset and watched as the sky continued to change.

I have shot the Calatrava addition to the museum innumerable times.  What helped these shots was not so much the architecture as the sky.  In my effort to capture unusual perspectives, I took the following shot that I converted to a black and white.

I liked this shot for the linear perspective and the fact that the "mast" appears to run parallel to the lines of the gallery structure in the left of the image.

During this trek the following item on an exterior wall of the museum caught my eye.

This turned out to be a pilaster capital from a Northwestern Mutual building dating from some 85 years ago.  I think the building was demolished a while back to make way for a newer office building approaching completion.

Speaking of that building, which is set to open at the end of the summer, here is an attempt to use unusual perspectives and compositions to capture it.

I converted this to a black and white because the evening sky was casting the glass exterior in essentially the same evening blue palette as the sky.   Across the street was a much older building, The Cudahy, and here are a couple of architectural detail shots of that building.

Now it was getting dark and it was on to the scene at the Milwaukee River that runs through the center of the downtown.

First is a shot of Milwaukee City Hall's clock tower.  

This shot was more difficult than it appears.  First, the ambient light was declining, leaving the tower very dark.   I had my tripod and used it for this shot.  For the record, this was shot at f/8 with an exposure of 0.8 seconds at an ISO of 200.  But this exposure left the clock faces overexposed.  To compensate, I needed to reduce exposure of the sky and clock faces and increase exposure of the tower itself.  All of this made me grateful for Lightroom.

To wind up the evening I took a few shots of the scene on the river, placing my tripod on one of the bridges to capture the evening lights and the reflections in the river.

This last shot includes the gibbous moon that was being "smeared" a bit by the wisps of clouds in the evening sky.

John