I thought this would be a new and maybe interesting place for angles on the city. I might have been wrong as this part of downtown Kansas City is one urban planning blunder after another, but I tried to make something decent looking from it. There are weeds growing out of the sidewalks and a huge parking lot at 20th, and a desolate feeling as there’s mostly nothing around but office uses, at least south up the hill on McGee. When you get north toward 20th there’s just too much parking to have much of a real city there until you move up to about 19th. There are all kinds of holes the 20th Century left in this city still needing to be patched.
Ten photos taken Monday evening of the former AMC Mainstreet Theatre, which recently became the the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. I licensed a few photos of this place to AMC not long after they opened back in 2008 I believe it was – and with the ownership change-up I figured I’d grab a few new ones. If they eventually modify the signage more-so than just the removal of the AMC logo, maybe it will warrant some more shots later.
I’m working on a project with the creative director at Rhythm Engineering, one of Kansas City’s fastest growing young companies – and designers of advanced “self-optimizing” traffic lights. On Thursday we shot a number of photos downtown and the Plaza. These are wide-angle and fisheye lens shots of local intersections with an emphasis placed on movement and flowing traffic – although I still need to hit up the Plaza today (Saturday) while it’s busier with people on the sidewalks and so-forth. Once all the shots are compiled and picked, they’re to be used for Rhythm’s marketing, advertising, and graphics uses.
For all eleven of these, I was shooting at a very low ISO of 50 and narrow apertures between f/18 and f/22, all to slow the shutter speed down to between a fifth and a tenth of a second so that the moving traffic would appear blurred, and thus help convey a sense of motion.