ST. JOSEPHAT'S: STAINED GLASS

I found myself back at Milwaukee's Basilica of St. Josephat recently looking for something new to shoot.  A little disappointing.  But I did take a few shots of the basilica's windows.  The interior of the basilica is so striking that it is easy to overlook the windows, which are interesting in their own right.  Like most modern stained glass windows, these were created, not by arranging smaller pieces of glass that had been stained a uniform color, but by painting larger pieces of glass with multiple colors to create the desired designs.

So here are details from a couple of the basilica's windows.

Here is a shot of another, semicircular window.  Again, the detail is beautiful.

Instead of showing the entire window, I chose to crop this down so that the glass fills the image.  I decided that the value was in the detail of the glass design, rather than in the overall shape of the window.  I did the same with the following shot of a rose window.

As with most rose windows, this was elevated, and I took the shot at an oblique angle from below.  As a result, the full window would appear oval rather than round, and I decided to avoid that by zooming in to the central portion of the window.

Following is a shot of the beautiful skylight window above the apse.  My regret here is that I could not shoot this from directly beneath the window because entering the sanctuary portion of the church is not allowed.

 Finally, there was the rose window behind the choir loft in the balcony at the rear of the nave.

My primary goal in this shot was to capture the trumpet elements of the pipe organ, as well as the colors of the rose window.  This was challenging because of the great difference in intensity of light between the window and the pipes.  This was the best I could do in post processing.  Pretty good, considering.

Here, finally, is a wide angle shot of the same rose window, which I am including to give an inkling of the ornate quality of the basilica's overall interior architecture.

John

REFLECTIONS AT THE MILWAUKEE CENTER

The Milwaukee Center is a 27-year-old complex in downtown Milwaukee that houses a hotel, an office tower, and a theater complex.  It features a central rotunda with corridors leading off in three directions.  It includes some interesting architectural details for a building of its recent vintage and I have been interested in doing a little photography there.  However, the other time I took my camera there, I got kicked out.  The guard told me I could not take photographs without a permit and that it would cost $150 to obtain such a permit.  But on that occasion I had my tripod and perhaps looked a bit serious for the guard.  In any event, I decided to return, perhaps posing as a guest of the hotel, without my tripod.  No guard this time.

To begin, here is a shot of one of the corridors, this one leading east toward the Milwaukee City Hall.

I thought that the corridor ceiling supports would make an interesting abstract, but here decided that I wanted to include the larger scene for context.

Following are a couple of photos of corridor archwork.

Visually, the first shot has more power because of the sharp shadows.  However, the black & white, taken from the side, has more of a "historical" feel to it that I also liked.

It was then that I noticed that the highly polished corridor floors were creating some interesting reflections of the bright sunlight streaming through the entrances and skylights.  Here is one of the shots I took of those reflections.

I liked this as an abstract.  However, I realized that the different colored tiles were too close to the bottom edge of the image and took another shot that was more centered.

And following are a couple more shots that don't have the interest that the above shot has.  Perhaps they lack the needed diversity of color that the proper shot has.

The best of these was one involving a small child who was enjoying the afternoon in the rotunda.

John

MILWAUKEE CITY HALL

I know I have posted shots of the Milwaukee City Hall before, but I was feeling restless in the heart of winter, the day was mild, and I wanted just to get out.  Plus there was semi-big news: the scaffolding that had enshrouded the building for several years had been removed!  The building, well into its second century, had experienced significant problems with deterioration of its terra cotta facade and repairs had taken several years, requiring the erection of elaborate scaffolding that had obscured the building's exterior.

So here, first, is an exterior view of the building.

Not a great shot, really.  It is taken from the rear of the building and does not do justice to the clock tower above the main entrance.  I guess I am just going to have to return.  The building's footprint is a trapezium, by the way (a four-sided figure no two sides of which are parallel, as distinguished from a trapezoid, which has two of its four sides parallel).

Here is a bit of a closer look at some of the building's detail.

The exterior facade is amply decorated with cherub-like figures, as in these detail shots.

A little weird to my way of thinking.

As I have shown before, the building's interior includes a central atrium encircled with balcony walkways on each of the seven floors above the ground floor.  Here are a couple of shots that I have taken numerous times in the past but I thought were worth revisiting.

And here is a shot looking down on the main floor from the eighth floor.

The lone figure helped provide context and scale.

All of the walkways are faced with ornate bronze guardrails that sport a dragon motif.

I thought this shot worked better as a black & white.  Unfortunately, the guardrail across the atrium creates a background distraction.  Here is another shot of a portion of the guardrail in shadow, allowing me to create a silhouette effect.

A little better, I think, although this sacrifices much of the detail.

John

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM OF UTAH

On the last day of our trip to Utah over the holidays, we visited the Natural History Museum of Utah, which sits in the foothills of the Wasatch range east of the University of Utah campus.  The museum is only a few years old and both the building and the exhibits have a fresh look to them.  Although the museum doesn't match up with Chicago's Field Museum, in my view it easily outshines its counterparts in Milwaukee and Denver.

Its setting is superb, as it faces the Salt Lake Valley to the west, providing a spectacular view of the snowcapped Oquirrh Range to the southwest of the city.  Here are a couple of shots of that view, the first a shot I took outside of the museum.

I like the following shot better, which I took from inside the museum, as it provides a better perspective for the overall scene.

Utah is prime dinosaur country, and their fossils play a central role in the museum.  Here are a few of the shots that I got.

Note how the eyeball of this last guy was encased in protective bone.  

These "fossils" are, for the most part, faithful reproductions, but I didn't mind that, as the museum also included some actually fossils in controlled settings.  The exhibits included a number of clear and well designed explanations to help educate the interested patron.  They also included this "artist's conception of the head of one of the dinosaurs.

If nothing else, it was a fun speculation.

Of course, the museum had exhibits in other natural history areas, including this ceremonial mask . . . 

. . . and this sculpture of a horse, which was part of a larger horse exhibit.

And then there was me being me, trying to capture some of the building's architecture and amenities as abstracts.

Overall, I was very much impressed by the museum.  Perhaps that is in part a function of the fact that my interests favor paleontology over, say, cultural history, and perhaps it is in part a function of the fact that the Utah museum is quite new and isn't populated with a number of really tired exhibits, such as dioramas, as is its Milwaukee counterpart.  

John

ZOO LIGHTS

Salt Lake City has a modest sized zoo only a few minutes from our son's home.  And while we were in Utah over the holidays we visited the zoo one night to see their light show, Zoo Lights.  I brought my camera along.

Our son and daughter-in-law met two other couples there who had children of about the same age, making for a nice tableau.

Most of the light displays featured zoo animals, naturally, including the following.

OK, this last might have been of questionable authenticity.

For the most part, I took these shots by underexposing them by one full f-stop.  Not only did that help to keep the background black, it also allowed me to take the shots at a lower ISO for a given shutter speed.

I also took some shots that incorporated some of the lights-wrapped, snow-clad trees.

Of course, zoos are about animals and there were some in the enclosed buildings, which also gave us the opportunity to warm up a little on a very cold night.  The one interesting animal photo I got was of four monkeys huddled together against the cold who had entwined their tails.

John