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Indoor
and outdoor architecture are some
of my favorite subjects for photography. Capturing the lighting
of a building at certain times of the day adds so much to
an image, especially churches. In my photographs of churches
and cathedrals around Maryland, I was interested in architecture
that isn't seen very often in modern churches, or any buildings
created since the turn of the century.
Columns flowing into multiple arches across ceilings, the
light flowing through stained glass windows to paint the interior
of a church or cathedral in beautiful colors, even organ pipes
in choir lofts, all have a sense of beauty, permanence and
timelessness not found elsewhere.
I have tried to capture the beauty of places
of worship in several of my trips around the Baltimore, Maryland
area. These two shots above show the exterior and interior
of the Corpus Christi church in Baltimore, Maryland near the
college I attended. The outside of the church was photographed
on a foggy day with no clouds, with very poor visibility at
ground level. I was only able to expose a good image by using
a polarizing filter and a timed exposure, and the interior
shot was a timed exposure over most of a minute as well, to
get the details of the architecture and good lighting. I expose
all of my timed shots using a tripod or other completely steady,
flat surface and a shutter release cable.
Annapolis, Maryland, also has a fascinating architectural
history. Buildings even outside of the United States Naval
Academy have been carefully crafted almost more than the capitol
in Washington DC itself. These buildings were built at many
different periods, creating a lot of very strange contrasts
between classical marble, columned buildings such as those
found in the Naval Academy to more modern turn-of-the-century
brick buildings with iron- and bronze-ornaments on fences,
gates and steps. I was attracted to the detail in this bronze
lion in the photograph above, near the more modern capitol
building in downtown Annapolis, and took several exposures
to bring out the form of the dark bronze lion without losing
the detail of the marble walkway and wall behind the statue.
I'm also interested in other forms of architecture besides
stone and metals. The boardwalks that go across the sand dunes
of my family's house in Grand Haven, Michigan, as well as
the house itself, are landmarks to me. The age of the wood,
the views from the boardwalks across Lake Michigan, and memories
of family gatherings are always strong in these places.
These
two photographs are, on the left, of my family's home in Grand
Haven, looking up the stairwell to the second floor, and on
the right, the boardwalk on the slope of the dune below the
house. The shot to the left of the stairwell is a mosaic of
four timed-exposure photographs, from straight ahead to directly
above, carefully overlapped to prevent color cast and exposure
differences, and placed together in a straight vertical line
with the help of my camera tripod. I put the mosaic together
using Adobe Photoshop, and had the final image printed using
a dye-sublimation printer. The outdoor shot of the boardwalk
was a normal photograph, shot with a polarizing filter to
show more saturated color, and slightly overexposed to grab
more contrast when the final print was made.
I'm also intersted in non-European
architecture. Re-created Cherokee buildings on the east coast,
and totem poles such as this image to the right show up in
my portfolio as well as more mainstream architectural images.
This totem pole stands tall outside the capitol building of
Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Its made of a heavy
carved wood, painted and sealed. The characters on the totem
pole are meant to symbolize the birds and animals of the area,
as well as the native population's activities. The bird on
the top is a species of eagle that lives in coastal areas
of the North American northwest coasts, preying on fish like
the human figure below it that holds a fishing spear.
This shot, like the Michigan family house interior, was shot
with a mosaic process using a tripod securely anchored in
place. Especially tough is exposing the sky so that the overlapping
photographs have the same contrast and color range. But once
again, the miracles of Photoshop save me when I went to combine
the three photographs that make up this image. Careful feathering
and dodging/burning on the overlapping areas were required
so that there was no banding or other inconsistencies in the
mosaic. I also used a polarizing
filter to get the most out of the near-sunset colored sunlight,
and to increase the contrast and
color saturation in the clouds and sky and the totem pole
itself. |
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