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I was out visiting my eccentric 92 year old grandmother for a long weekend out in the country in Stafford Kansas, a four hour drive southwest of Kansas City. Maybe another post with more photos later on. All the shots in this post were with the pairing of my Canon 5D Mark II with my Canon 16-35 L II wide angle lens.
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…
Inside The Link in February
I returned again to The Link skywalk over Pershing and Main at Crown Center on Saturday evening for more photos. I collected five total I want to post, this one being the first. Two were with my standard wide angle lens, as this photo above is, and three more were taken with my fisheye lens. Both work great inside a skywalk looking from inside out.
Downtown KC at Sunset, November '10
Photo is from something I was gathering a week or two back in some work detailing the Kauffman Center construction.
Due to someone’s scheduling foul-up the photo show I’ve been posting about is put back to Friday, December 10 instead of this coming Friday. So, don’t come this Friday. (facebook)
Downtown KC Sunset, Nov. 2010
A quick project I’m working on briefly has taken me back to the top of the city hall garage for a couple of recent sunsets. This shot of the old Power and Light Building with the H&R Block Headquarters and the Bartle Hall pylons (technically called Skystations I believe) was something additional I noticed while up there, and thought it would be fun to shoot at the end. Just for laughs I took an iPhone photo of my big camera rigged after I took this one. Because of the very high guard rails on newer garages like the city hall garage, I had to raise the tripod about a foot higher than my head and compose the shot looking up at the live view function on my camera’s LCD.
I took five exposures at one stop apart each bracketed manually for eventual HDR work on the photo to get the evened out colors and tones in the sky.
Here’s that iPhone shot –
Getting the photo in the lovely City Hall Garage.
Reminder: Photography show at The Hook Gallery in Westport on Friday December 3rd. Here are the Facebook and Yelp listings.
The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art at Sunset in the fall of 2010.
Photo at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City on Tuesday, Nov. 16. Two or three times I’ve ambled around trying to get one or two decent fall shots this year, finally settling on this one. As I’ve noted, I’ll be having a gallery show and sale coming up Friday, December 3rd, and my gallery dude over at The Hook in Westport said I should make a point to get a fall foliage photo to include with the other stuff on the wall – which will be an assortment of Kansas City skyline scenes, Kauffman Center progression, and Plaza Lights shots in keeping with the time of year. Basically a big replenishing my outdated stock at The Hook.
Like I noted in my Tuesday posting, come by the show if you’re looking for something to see or some shots to buy. The Hook Gallery is located in Westport near Californos and Murray’s, in the “Horseshoe” area of retail shops at 4120 Pennsylvania, KCMO (map).
Nelson Atkins Museum with reflections in the Bloch addition glass.
Two things for this post:
Announcing a photography art show on the evening of Friday December 3rd at The Hook Gallery and Framing event space (map, website) in the Westport “Horseshoe” near Californos and Murray’s. We’re replenishing the outdated stock of my wares therein and will be showing some Plaza Lights photos in the spirit of the season, as well as sights like the Kauffman Center’s progress and its change on the Kansas City skyline so far this year. There will be lots of new matted and framed prints, and custom orders for specific sizes and matte/frame combinations will be taken as well. Please, everyone feel welcome to come by and bring your friends too. With digital photography there are a lot of online/Facebook/Twitter buddies out there too so it would be a fun meeting face to face.
On this photo above – On Monday evening at the Nelson Atkins Museum I was working with the Visitor’s Association to help them get some customized shots on the grounds centering on the new Bloch addition. While preparing and while we were waiting for just the right light, I thought it would be fun to slip on the wide-angle lens again and do another glass/architectural reflection type of thing I’ve come to enjoy doing recently. Here we can kind of see both parts of the interior and exterior of the Bloch addition, with a nice sunlit reflection of the original 1930s building in the glass.
Sunset view from Downtown Kansas City
One more shot from the top of the City Hall parking garage looking west right after sunset. It was good and colorful last Saturday evening when I took this. Unfortunately so much of the urban parts of Kansas City have been gobbled up by parking, it can be hard getting a good shot of things that aren’t parking structures or lots – all the more ironic since it’s convenient to go to the top of garages to get elevated views. But only to a point apparently – too many garages everywhere and there’s nothing left worth looking at.
Since the City Hall garage is rather new, it has very high guard rails making it about impossible to take a picture through the camera’s viewfinder. For this one I had to activate the Live View mode so I could see the visual on the camera’s LCD and prop it up high with my tripod, and manually bracket my shots looking at the light meter display on the LCD. So that’s one other advantage of my Canon 5D Mark II – as much as I loved my old original 5D I couldn’t have gotten this shot with it.
Sunset scene from downtown Kansas City in October 2010.
While gathering yet more shots of the Kauffman Center construction, I turned my telephoto lens a bit to the southwest while standing on McGee at sunset on Wednesday October 6th. This is a shot of the Assurant Building, the Westin Crown Center Hotel, Liberty Memorial, and One Park Place back in the distance. I’ve been using five or six manually bracketed RAW files at varying light exposures and merging to HDR with Photomatix recently for these shots with extremely gradual changes in color and tone that come about so often when you’re shooting photos right after sunset.
Pastures outside Preston, Kansas
Photo taken this past Sunday evening. I see here in August the moon rises at just the right time for a certain dramatic effect. I was in Preston, Kansas, a tiny, and regrettably foundering town of which I have some ties to. I stop there every once in a while when I’m visiting my grandmother who now lives in Stafford, roughly twenty miles to the north.
This photo is different than my normal in a few ways. I deactivated the telephoto lens’s auto-focus and manually trained it on the moon, allowing everything else to blur, including the foliage. I took several varied exposures for HDR to display the very subtle differences to be seen in color and contrast across parts of the photo. Actually I do that kind of thing frequently, but manually focusing on blissful, pastoral country settings take a bit of getting accustomed to for me. Normally I leave the serene nature photography to people who have more practice at it. I imagine those photographers are of a more serene and content personal nature in general as well. It makes one wonder.
Stafford Train Depot
The old unused train station/depot in Stafford Kansas, this past Saturday evening, 08/21/10. Maybe old unused depots are cliche subject matter, but whatever. This one has the red glow of the exit sign inside showing through the windows. I was out there in southern Kansas for a long weekend.