MILWAUKEE CITY HALL REVISITED

I previously visited Milwaukee's City Hall in early 2012 (see post of February 18, 2012).  I decided to pay another visit with my camera this last week.  This time I wanted to concentrate on trying to get photos either that I did not get or that I was disappointed with what I got last time.  

I did take a number of shots of the larger scene, as I had before.  Here are a couple from the fourth floor . . .

and a couple from the first floor.

I like this last shot best because it doesn't have the "clutter" that the others have.  In addition, I found more pleasing the curved portions of the balconies in this shot.

This time I did a better job of photographing the balcony railings, which are comprised of wrought iron panels.  In the following shot I worked hard to position one of the panels directly in front of an exterior window to give the shot symmetry.

OK, but the patterns in the panel are obscured by the different shades of light reflected in the floor behind the panel.  Here is another shot where I was able to position a panel in front of a more uniformly lit background.

Better, but the wrought iron is fully silhouetted and does not reflect all of the detail in the wrought iron.  Here is a close-up that does a better job.

I took this with the lens wide open, minimizing depth of field to avoid having the railing on the other side of the narrow atrium creating a clutter distraction.

Here is a closer shot of the snake (or maybe dragon?) design . . .

which I thought also worked as a B&W.

In my earlier post I also included some shots outside of the front entrance to the building that features very substantial roman arches.  The problem in the past was that the sun was creating too much unwanted contrast.  This time it was overcast, so there was no sun to deal with.

As I stated before, Milwaukee has the distinction of being exactly 99 years older than me, so it will be celebrating its 167th birthday at the end of this month.

FAVORITE PHOTOS: 2012

To finish off the year I thought I would post some of my favorite photos from 2012.  So I put together 20 photos that I took during the calendar year.

Macro

When I put together the set of photos, I did not pay attention to how many of each category of photos that I was including.  I do a lot of macro photography and enjoy it a lot.  But when I looked over my list, only three macro shots were included.  Here they are.

I took this first shot at the Mitchell Domes in February.  I especially liked it because of the blossoms' soft, pastel colors and almost dreamlike quality.  It didn't bother me that only portions of the flowers were in focus.

The second shot was of a bromeliad that I . . . ahem . . . had gotten Geri for Mother's Day, but perhaps subconsciously thought might make an interesting photographic subject.

This shot was actually of just a portion of the central stalk of the plant that was being backlit by sunlight.

The third shot, which i converted to a B&W, is of a weed in an open field at the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center.

Again, the leaf was being nicely backlit by the sun.  The key was that the leaf was nearly flat, i.e., lying in a single plane, enabling me to keep the entire leaf in good focus.  It also helped that there was virtually no wind to deal with.

Architecture

Architecture is another area that I am becoming more interested in.  The first is an interior shot of Milwaukee's City Hall.  I discovered that although one is allowed to take photos inside the building, it is only after one has answered a number of questions posed by Milwaukee's finest.

The building's interior is a joy to photograph and I know I will be returning in 2013.

The shot below is from my second visit to St. Josephat's Basilica, which has a so-so exterior but an absolutely stunning interior.

In late September, I took advantage of an event known as Doors Open Milwaukee that permitted public access to Milwaukee venues not otherwise generally available.  One of these is the Mackie Building's Grain Exchange, an absolutely magnificent interior.  Here is one of a number of shots that I took there.

Another venue available for the Doors Open event was an older office building at 735 North Water Street that had recently been extensively renovated.  Perhaps the interior is not spectacular, but the following shot I got was technically very good, particularly for hand-held.

Although most of the architectural shots I picked were interior ones, I also very much liked the following exterior shot of the Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum.

This building has been [photographed a million times but this shot worked because of the evening light.

Landscape

This is a fairly diverse category.  The first of these was a shot of an abandoned farmhouse near our home that I found myself going back to on a number of occasions, despite the presence of abundant no trespassing signs.  The house made a nice subject because I could capture it without any other manmade structures to complicate the composition.

I took the landscape (actually cityscape) shot below when we were visiting New York City in late January.  It was Sunday morning and there was essentially no traffic, so I could stand in the middle of the street without getting run over by a taxi.  I only wanted to capture the sunlight striking the buildings, but then noticed the family that was most likely leaving a hotel with their luggage in tow.

We spent March in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I discovered some very flat farm fields with extremely straight furrows.  My post of these shots has become far and away the most viewed post on my blog, primarily because a couple of photos from the post somehow got picked up by Google in a collection of shots of farm fields.

As I have explained in other posts, the following was a serendipitous shot that I took from my son's car while we were traveling in central Utah to do some hiking.

At first I thought the shot was a bust, but came to like it because of its impressionistic quality.

And here is a shot from one of our hikes, this one of Little Wild Horse Canyon, a really fun, and not difficult, slot canyon.

The photo's probably not as good as my memory of the hike.

The following shot was also serendipitous in a way, as I had stopped my car to get some shots of some fruit trees in Wisconsin's Kettle Moraine and then noticed the fence when I had given up on the trees.  Again, I was fortunate to get some good images despite the lack of a tripod--which I failed to retrieve from my car out of sheer laziness.

The following landscape shot was more intentional, as I was looking to get some good photos of the National Mall in the morning light before a light fog was totally burned off.

I have another wider-angle shot that includes the entire Washington Monument, but I have come to like this one a bit better.  I think that the small tree in front of the monument adds a lot to the overall composition, as do the few pedestrians.

This and That

The remaining photos rounding out this collection are harder to classify.  This first is of a storage tank located in an extensive petroleum depot on the northwest side of Milwaukee.  I was taken with the shadows being created on the side of the white tank by the spiral staircase.

This was another instance where I was kicked off the premises.

The following is of a small, simple, but beautiful adobe mission located in Old Town Scottsdale.  Again, the abundant sunlight helped to make this shot.

I got lucky again during a class I was taking in night photography when I pointed my camera at what I thought were simple reflections in the Milwaukee River and discovered that the shot I got was a lot more complex than I had anticipated.

Here is another shot of "my" abandoned farmhouse that I took later in the year.  I realized that I was quickly losing my available light and took this shot just as the sun was touching the horizon.

I liked that the house was thrown into a dark, bluish shadow.

And, finally, there is the frog from Schlitz Audubon.  I actually took a number of photos of frogs, some of which were technically better than this one.  But I liked this one because it seems obvious that the frog was looking right at me.

LIGHTS ON TEMPLE SQUARE

We spent Christmas this year in Salt Lake City, visiting our son and his wife, as well as our daughter and her boyfriend, who flew in from Washington, D.C.  The LDS (Mormon) Church, headquartered in Salt Lake City, creates a stunning light display each holiday season at their Temple Square area.  Twice during our visit we spent time enjoying the light show, along with thousands of other sightseers.

I, of course, brought my camera to try to capture what I could of the show.  This posed a number of technical challenges.  First, the scene was generally low-light, so I needed to ramp up the ISO on my camera to compensate for the fact that all the shots were hand-held.  In addition, white balance was an issue.  I wanted to capture the colors as I was seeing them, but that is not necessarily what my camera was registering.  As a result, there was some variation in color balance, as I was frequently adjusting my white balance in an attempt to get the color "right."  Finally, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of other visitors, so "clean" shots were, in most cases, simply not possible.

First, there is the temple itself.  A very impressive building, it is bathed in light for the holiday display.  I could not capture the entire building in a single shot, but here are some shots of parts of the building.

This last shot has been modified.  Normally, when one photographs a building from ground level, the top is further away than the base, so the top of the building appears smaller and the sides of the building appear to be leaning in, as is most apparent in the second shot above.  However, I have a Lightroom application that allows me to compensate for that problem in perspective, as appears in this third shot.

And here are a couple more shots of the temple.

I understand that the gold figure on top of the temple represents the angel Moroni.

This tree was one of the few not covered with lights.  I liked how it is silhouetted against the temple.  The wrought iron fencing also helped the composition.

Although the temple served as the centerpiece for the show, the lights on the trees were simply spectacular. The challenge was to create an understandable composition.  Here are a couple of the general scene that I think illustrate the problem.

Colorful, but it is difficult to understand what is going on.  Here are a couple of shots in which I tried to show tree trunks and branches that were outlined by the lights.

This last shot gives some sense of how densely the lights were strung on the trees.  

One of the issues I ran into was that to my eyes, the lights appeared larger than pinpoints, whereas the camera was able to show the lights as being closer to point sources.  The result of this was that the lights in the photos don't appear as bright as they did to the eye.  In an attempt to compensate for this, in some photos I used the technique of intentionally putting the lights out of focus.

. . . perhaps too much out of focus.

And here is a shot that features tree branches that had been flooded with light.

Within a minute after I took this shot, the lights illuminating the branches were turned off, so I was happy that I got my shot before that happened.

There is a reflecting pool in front of the temple and for the holidays it features a nativity scene.  Here are a couple of shots of that scene, taken on different nights.

Note the difference in white balance between the two shots.  I like the second shot better, even though it seems a little too blue.  The dark area behind the scene in the first shot is simply the large crowd of visitors.  The second shot was taken Christmas night, when the crowds were significantly smaller.  And here is a shot taken with my back to the temple, showing the lights in the background.

There were statues for other elements in the overall nativity scene, including a shepherd and his sheep and a wise man on a camel.

Finally, here is a shot of the general scene.

Taken with my Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 lens.