At least they call it the 9th floor. From the ground floor, you take a four-story escalator (sic) to 5 where the Endless Bridge is and then up an incline to the next floor that is called 5R. Then there is an elevator. Bob and I got to the elevator just as the play Jane Eyre got out. We pushed the up button, but the elevators going up went past us and only stopped on the way down to pick up the blue hairs. We gave up and took the stairs. Only four floors up right? After a brief moment of terror upon sighting the sign that said “first floor access only” we went up. And up. There were at least three landings where there should have been a floor but there wasn’t. Eventually, exhausted and confused we stumbled upon the ninth floor.

What a space! (art speak) Every space with a view in this building comes with a bar, no exception here. They carried on the Walker Art Gallery’s use of cold, square box rooms. Odd how the lack of a baseboard can make you uncomfortable.

If you have ever been to this room, you will notice right away that I made a significant change to the picture above. The Guthrie is suffering from either a Best Buy or Ikea color infestation. Everything is blue and yellow, vast fields of blue and yellow. The windows are tinted, and maybe it was because I was wearing my sunglasses the whole time, but it’s really dark in there, and a yellow-dark is a weird sensation.

So what did I do to the picture? I shot in camera raw mode. Why? Color. Specifically white balance. A digital camera can capture far more color information than the eye. With a raw file, you can adjust the image for the light, be it daylight, cloudy, tungsten, etc. The windows in the observatory were tinted Best-Buy-yellow. With the raw file, I was able to remove that and make the window look normal. Also, I under exposed it to keep the details outside and to make the people silhouettes. Why? It matches the soulessness of modern art and because of the lighting in the Guthrie and possibly my sunglasses, that’s how everyone looked to me.

How about the Endless Bridge? Next time…