The steel cube is called Alamo, and you can find it in Astor Place in New York. I don’t think it is a widely photographed New York landmark, and the difficulty in finding an angle probably contributes . I actually found it only because I had too much time on my hands and wanted to discover just this part of town and on foot. I like the contrast between the simple shape of the cube and the complicated detail in the building behind it, as well the contrast of their colors.

The image was taken here.

I took this image with HDR in mind when I was walking around Greenwich Village in New York in December. I was exploring NYU campus, as my husband suggested few nice photographic opportunities. I found this shaded walkway in front of School of Law and stopped by to photograph. I love the detail the HDR provides for architectural photography. Just look at the texture of the ceiling.

The image was taken here.

Last time we were visiting New York, we took camera with us for two evening walks around Manhattan. We were taking series of images for HDR processing. It was our laziness, we did not use the tripod, so even with steady hands some of them did not turn out too well. Some I had problems getting around people moving all over the frame. But this one turned out just fine.

A few weeks ago, we went one evening downtown to get some interesting pictures of the streets for a Digital Photography School weekend challenge. Our assignment image is buried somewhere on page 23, but this one I think I like even more. To get to the final effect, however, I did some playing with Lightroom and Photomatix. It is one-image HDR, custom white balance, and blue graduated neutral density filter on the sky.

When I saw yet another contest on Darwin Wiggett blog, this time calling for a Canadian landscape, I instantly thought about our old images from the trip to Vancouver almost 3 years ago. We took the images with our Konica Minolta Dimage Z2 we had back then. Although the quality of images varies significantly, both by composition and graininess due to not great performance in high ISO (like 200 ), I am sure I will be able to pick up something for the contest. Meantime, one of the images just looked like HDR almost by itself, but I decided to improve it even more. We took it one evening on the walk around Granville Island, disappointed that the market was already closed, but willing to explore the neighborhood nevertheless.

The convenience of an iPhone. You stop at red light, see an image, take iPhone out, the camera app on and… snap a photo. Like this one- we were going downtown Iowa City for lunch, when I noticed the spiral of smoke coming out of chimneys in power plant. And that the two smokes were of different color. I thought it would be an interesting image, so … I took it .

For those still in leftover holiday mood, some Christmas light bokeh. It was taken during the holiday week between Christmas and New Years, when you couldn’t  do anything outside in Iowa, as the temperature was in single digits, and there was a wind chill on top of it. Of course, with so much time in hands, it was really hard to stay indoors , especially that I find photographing around the house extremely boring. So, we took a very short trip downtown, to find something interesting to photograph, and succeeded in freezing rather then exceptional photographs. But this one certainly deserves showing.

I guess it is high time to reveal the secret of the abstract photo from this post. Regine, you were very close, the picture shows a window. It was actually a row of keyhole shaped windows in the hall of African Mammals in American Museum of Natural History in New York. The tree like shape on the window comes from shades made from wicker, thus it might make you think of a tree.
Here is another view of the windows. I was photographing from dark inside of the room to the bright midday outside, thus the windows are only silhouettes, blurred in corners by Lensbaby (right again, Regine!).
Next post is number 400. Who would think….

This was really busy year for me, photographically that is. I was taking far more pictures every week than I was able to process. I am browsing through last years part of my Lightroom catalog, discovering images and series of images I did not have a chance to post on the blog. I am just making notes of all the galleries I can put together, if and when I have time to process all this stuff.
This week gallery is a collection of images we took last spring, when visiting Chicago with my parents. It was a hectic time when they were here, and I think I did not post for several weeks. All those nice images disappeared in the bulk.
There is a story behind the shoot- we took the Architecture Cruise in Windy City twice already. Both times in April. One at the beginning, one at the end. Both times, it was raining with temperatures around 40F. Not a great photo weather.

Winter in Iowa. Temperature somewhere around 20F. Wind chill somewhere around 0F. You do not really want to do anything outside, but it is holiday and long weekend, and after day 4 you really cannot find anything to do inside anymore. At least snow came, finally, so we decided to move from the living room and try finding something to photograph close to home. What we ended up being successful was making miles, but there are few interesting keepers. This one happened when we drove through Iowa City, around the university campus, and the sun was getting ready to set, with already lower, orange light.