Another post covering some of my new shots for the KC Parks Department’s Green Exposures photo project, for this I stopped at Garment District Place at 8th and Broadway last week in the early evening. I later went and caught that night’s really good hour of lighting at Washington Square Park by Crown Center which I posted last week, so while at the Garment District I had to make due with less interesting lighting. So admittedly I got a little more free with the editing to manipulate the light as much as I could. First a couple fountain shots…
Then there was this one image that has a real estate sign in the upper left. Just for teh lulz let’s have a look at the stages this photo passes through.
1) Original
Above – this is the original RAW converted to JPG at zero exposure compensation. It’s fairly uninteresting as far as I’m concerned. So since I did bracketing and burst mode with this shot and I have two other versions with a +2 and a -2 exposure compensation I’ll then run them through Photomatix and get this with the sliders a certain way…
2) Three exposures tone mapped in Photomatix
Then I wanted to meddle a bit further in Photoshop now, sometimes you have to fix things that can go wrong when using HDR, but mainly for this I just wanted some color and tone adjustments.
3) Post-Photoshop.
At the end since it doesn’t matter one way or another, and it will make the photo look better, I decided to get rid of that For Sale sign by using the Content Aware Fill function and the clone stamp in Photoshop CS5 –
As part of my work right now for the KCMO Parks Department’s Green Exposures project, I’m grabbing some new shots of places around the city overseen by the Parks Dept. that I don’t have much existing material on. For this post I have nine photos of the Colonnade at Gladstone Blvd and St. John Avenue, ending with a shot at Concourse Park. I’m posting ten images since the curvature of the Colonnade gives you a lot of material to work with when wielding wide-angle and fisheye lenses.
Concourse Park and Fountain
I’m working on a photo project for the KCMO Parks Dept which entails gathering and collecting shots of KC parks and amenities, so Saturday evening I was at Case Park in Quality Hill downtown. At the end I brought out my telephoto lens and aimed it toward the West Bottoms trying to catch that tradeoff between natural light and artificial light. These two pics obviously won’t be submitted as part of my parks project but I wanted to include them in a photoblog posting nonetheless. The narrow aperture of f/18 for both pictures causes the starburst effect from the street lights as the aperture blades inside the lens refract the light onto the sensor.
From Case Park toward the West Bottoms at a focal length of 180 mm.
At the maximum 400 mm focal length on my telephoto lens toward part of the West Bottoms.
The center-point of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico and a hub for the touristy historic area, the public square Plaza de Colón in San Juan.
A placeholder weekend post – a photo from my trip to Puerto Rico back in mid-March. I still haven’t quite finished all the editing work on those photos yet. Another image I shot while there, at Fort San Felipe del Morro, is now listed on Getty Images.
I took these two telephoto shots the same night as the two wide-angles from my most recent prior posting. I had gone that night to 18th and Jefferson to train the telephoto lens on the Kauffman Center for a scheduled lighting pattern inside the building, but that didn’t go as planned – plus I think if I’m to ever get any decent shots of the building from that location I’m going to have to rent a lens that extends farther than the 400 mm maximum focal length on my own telephoto lens.
Downtown Kansas City skyline on Monday night, June 13…
I had reasons to be at 18th and Jefferson Monday night for photos, but those plans didn’t work right so instead I went beyond the open fence on the open plot of land where the “L-Shaped house” used to sit and did a couple shots with the trees and the I-35 traffic and the skyline with the new Kauffman Center building being shown off in the distance.
My friend Tony’s Kansas City has recently taken to referring to Kansas City as a “wicked little town,” on occasion. Which I think is hilarious. So much so that I think the Convention and Visitor’s Association should be a bit riskier and re-brand our city as a wicked little town – which could boost tourism and conventions, furthering the downtown renaissance which we could then give Tony credit for in the end.
Anyway, two pics from Monday night June 13, a wicked little town in the early summer…
Three new pics from downtown on Friday night right just as the rain started moving in.
The world’s largest skateboard is in town on Grand Avenue for the Street League Skateboarding tournament at the Sprint Center this weekend. There were more people visible in this first scene but they don’t show in the photo due to the long exposure time –
Then down to Truman and Grand, looking north back toward the downtown loop…
The following is from pointing the camera with my fisheye lens affixed toward the overpass fence glass and seeing what light from whichever directions shows up and where – looking eastward along Truman and Grand –
A view from around 18th and Wyandotte near the Arts Incubator in the Crossroads District back on June’s First Friday, 6/03/11. There were a couple dancers performing in the street and traffic was running pretty slow through this crowd. I kind of think they should consider closing off that block at 18th between Baltimore and Wyandotte during First Fridays in the warm weather months.
Two shots from around the Brandmeyer Great Hall in the soon-to-be completed Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Kansas City. They’ve just launched their Twitter feed for the 100 day countdown to the grand opening, https://twitter.com/#!/KauffmanCenter
Above: Near what will be the bar area on the upper level with a view toward the south.
Below: One of the elevators with a bit of the KCMO skyline in the distant background (City Hall, Jackson County Courthouse, Bolling Federal Building, Sprint Center).
This morning (Saturday June 4) a protest by local Catholics took place across the street from Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception at 11th and Broadway in downtown Kansas City, MO due to revelations of a Kansas City Diocese cover-up and consultation with their own lawyers over the discovery of child pornography on Father Shawn Ratigan’s computer in December 2010. Bishop Finn, who is being called on to resign, was inside ordaining deacons. More info can be found here. I got word of the protest this morning via this article on Tony’s Kansas City.
Two shots from last night, 6/2/2011 of the recently installed “Ferment” stainless steel tree sculpture by artist Roxy Paine on a hill in the southeastern portion of the lawn of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO.
above – wide angle lens
below – fisheye lens
