A Quiet Campus Sidewalk
Nikon D7000 10-24mm @ 24mm ISO 320 1/8 f/11 Lr4, TpzSim; PsCS6
It is late afternoon on the sidewalk under the shade of mature trees lining Sixth Street on the campus of Pomona College, Claremont, California. The building is Clark Hall V, a student residence, the tower in the background is Smith Tower which has both a clock and carillon. By local tradition the carillon chimes at 47 minutes after every hour.
Prints of this image and similar interpretive images are available at: http://goo.gl/5XCBv .
Smiley Hall
Nikon D7000 18-200mm @ 20mm ISO 320 3-bkts f/11 :Lr4, TpzSim; PsCS6
Albert K. Smiley Hall (1908). The first residence hall built on the campus of Pomona College, Claremont, California. This is a great campus for walking around and enjoying and appreciating the lush landscaping that the college buildings are set in. Clean and quiet, away from the hustle and bustle of the Southern California megalopolis.
Prints of this image and similar interpretive images are available at: http://goo.gl/5XCBv .
Memorial To An Education Uncompleted & A Life Cut Short
Nikon D7000 1-200mm @ 18mm ISO 800 3-bkts f/13 Lr4, HEP1, TpzSim; PsCS6
I love these doors, I love the drama of the entire threshold. This is the Mabel Shaw Bridges Hall of Music (Little Bridges), Pomona College, Claremont, California. The Mission style building was designed by Myron Hunt and built in 1915. It had it latest renovation in 2001. The building was a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Appleton Shaw Bridges in honor of their daughter Mabel Shaw Bridges ’08, who died after an illness in 1907.
Halls Of Academia
Nikon D7000 18-200mm @ 18mm ISO 800 3-bkts f/11 Lr4, HEP1, TpzSim; PsCS5
The view looking south through Lebus Court at Pomona, College, Claremont, California. Lebus Court was designed by Myron Hunt and erected in 1915 at the rear of Mabel Shaw Bridges Hall of Music (“Little Bridges”). Lebus Court, along with Rembrandt Hall houses the Department of Art & Art History at the college. The building directly south is Harwood Hall, the first residential hall constructed on the campus in 1921.
In relative terms, the buildings and campus of Pomona College offer some of the most mature architecture and landscaping to be found in the Southern California area since they have been standing roughly 100 years. This test of time is quite an achievement in a locale that has historically been ever evolving, ever changing during the past century and a half. I really like the feeling I get from the stonework and the building structure and texture in this image, from the lush, fully mature greenery. Pomona is a great campus for walking and enjoying green things, with many mature and majestic trees. I have never been comfortable or inspired in schools and classrooms, never fully engaged in classroom learning, but being on the campus of Pomona College I get a great feeling of contentment and permanence. This rendering makes me feel good.
Monumental Structures
Nikon D7000 10-24mm @ 10mm ISO 640 3-bkts f/20 Lr3, HEP1, TpzSim; PsCS5
One can make the argument that any given city hall building is a monument to self (those that founded and developed the city). Here is a monument in front of a monument. The Glendora, California City Hall, “guarded” by a monument in the form of an obelisk that was erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution on the city’s centennial, although it would appear from the inscription that the obelisk is another monument to self:
IN COMMEMORATION OF
THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE CITY OF GLENDORA
AND
THE SEVENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF
THE INCORPORATION OF THE CITY OF GLENDORA
AND
THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF
THE PRESENTATION OF
THE CENTURLON VAULT AND OBELISK
THIS MARKER IS PLACED AND DEDICATED OCTOBER 1985
BY
SERRANO CHAPTER
NATIONAL SOCIETY
DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
MRS. ROYAL WHATLEY – REGENT
MRS. BARBARA ALBRECHT – HISTORIAN
MRS. RALPH FISHER – ADVISOR
Dusk Falls On City Hall
Nikon D80 10-24mm @ 24mm ISO 200 3-bkts f/11 HDR Efex Pro, Ps5, Viveza, Color Efex Pro
As the sun was getting low over Fillmore City Hall the shadows grew longer and the moon began rising in the eastern sky when I captured the brackets for this image.. The scene might suggest that the seat of government in Fillmore has stood the test of time, that would, however, be an incorrect conclusion. Fillmore was first settled around the time that the city’s grid was first laid out in 1887, incorporation occurred in 1914. While the appearance of this photograph would suggest that the Fillmore City Hall may have been erected at about the time of incorporation, in reality, this is the sixth incarnation of the Fillmore City Hall and it was built in 1997.
To arrive at this final image I combined and tone mapped three bracketed exposures using HDR Efex Pro. I used a combination of Viveza and Photoshop to adjust exposure and tone, and an adjustment layer in Photoshop to replace the halo’ed sky that resulted after the HDR process. The original color tones were too garish to my taste and inaccurate to boot, I used the Color Efex Pro Duplex filter to alter the color tones and the Color Efex Pro Vignette Blur filter to soften the focus on the edges of the image. Lightroom was used for final sharpening.
This was another image that I had worked over quite a bit, and only over time was I able to control my urges to produce a “punchy” image, and arrive at a more subtle interpretation and final vision. I really think that it does help to put aside my images after first processing them, and resist the urge to publish them immediately, so that over time I will find my way back to the images, and a different, and hopefully, better perspective. Deliberation is the key to producing memorable images.
View Through The Barrel Vault; Never Forget To Look Behind You
Nikon D80 10-24mm @ 10mm ISO 200 f/11 7 Bkts 5.0 sec to 20.0 sec LR3 HDR Efex Pro
This image looking through the barrel vaulted lobby area of the Pasadena City Hall was captured the same evening as the image in my previous post. Prior to making the image above, I had been positioned about midway between the foreground and the archway you see from this vantage point, facing in the opposite direction as this. I was trying to capture a similar archway with pediments that was framing the atrium beyond. The image that I captured in that attempt, when rendered on the LCD on the back of the camera was not as successful as I had hoped, it was then that I moved forward (toward the back arch I had been targeting) and turned around that I realized the better composition was the image that presented itself behind me.
In this scene we are looking through the barrel vaulted, tiled outdoor lobby area of the city hall, looking west in to the evening sky just after sundown. This is a very interesting location for photography, for some reason this image seems very film noir-ish to me, making me think of the movie “Chinatown” that starred Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston. You sort of wonder who will step out from the shadows next to the building columns.
This and the previous image captured at this location have, in my opinion, been my best HDR images created to date.
Storm Over City Hall
Nikon D80 10-24mm @ 10mm ISO 640 f/11 5 bkts Lr3 HDREfexPro1 ColorEfexPro3
Although it looks like a storm is brewing in this image, those are actually the last vestiges of a storm that blew in the previous few days from the Pacific and headed east over Southern California. The view of the Pasadena City Hall is from the southwest corner of Holly Street and Garfield Avenue, the Jackie Robinson memorial was directly behind me.
Behind the shrubs in the front of the building is a subterranean walkway (open to the sky, below the first floor windows) that circles the entire building perimeter (running under the front steps). As we were capturing these images I was accosted by one of the local homeless people, noticing the camera on the tripod she wanted to know if we were with the news media. I told her “no, I just enjoy taking pictures”. Shen then informed me about the “moat” around city hall, going on to say the city filled it with water and stocked it with piranhas. (The reality is that the “moat” is the walkway in front of the basement level windows of the building, which allows natural light to come through to the basement.) I thanked her, she continued on her way and I continued with my photography.
I have been thinking about the subjects of my photography recently and realize that I am attracted to images of objects or scenes created by the hand of Mother Nature and by the hand of man. Judy and I have made a conscious decision to capture scenery, including lots of trees, in the natural world, we are also both attracted to motor vehicles and I have an interest in aircraft and architecture. In a more documentary and historical preservation sense my eye is attracted to images or scenes that depict humans experiencing life, interacting in their contemporary environment, and scenes (with or without living subjects) depicting contemporary life and life in an earlier time. This is what you can expect to see unfolding in this blog, and hopefully, it will all be telling an interesting story.
This was my first image created with the assistance of my Promote Control, which calculated and instructed the camera to fire off five brackets at f/11 from .6 second to 1/400 second. Utilizing this new tool has been a learning experience and it took me a while to figure out that I had to slow down the Promote Control to 2,000 milliseconds in order to not overwhelm the D80 .
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