Archive for November 2007

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Minneapolis Greenway Bridge Part Two

This is an additional picture of the Minneapolis Midtown Greenway Bridge. I spent some more time cranking the color balance around to get this bridge to match the Guthrie Theater colors (also known as Best Buy or Ikea colors). Minneapolis Metro Blog just featured my Greenway pictures on their site.

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Minneapolis Midtown Greenway Bridge

The Minneapolis Midtown Greenway Bridge is now open to the public! It's true, I went to the Grand Opening Ceremony last night. The mayor was there as well as all the officials that made this impressive bridge possible. It's unique in that on the side opposite of the cable stay tower is a light rail line and a power transmission line. The bridge actually threads between them. It's something to see, but not at night. I got up early this morning to go down and take these pictures. When the ceremony was over last night, it was too gray and dark to take any good pics, and since I biked over, I didn't bring the tripod for a proper night shot. I choked up the aperture to f9 at 15 seconds. I put the white balance at 5100k to get the car lights white and the bridge lights are actually blue. Noise reduction really helps the black, and yes, I like the lens flare very much, thank you. The bridge connects two trails making it possible for me (and anyone else, God I'm self-involved) to bike from my neighborhood — Uptown, Minneapolis, MN all the way to the Mississippi river on trails. The trail system in this town is pretty impressive, ONE can bike all around the cities on trails. I regularly bike to St. Paul and back on trails, a round trip of forty miles. Mayor Rybak said last night that Minneapolis is the second most biked city in the country. Lean more about the bridge and the event at the Star Tribune So hooray for Minneapolis, enjoy the new bridge and river access, I'm going back to bed. Here's the far side of the bridge — not many pictures of this bridge include the far side because it isn't that interesting. It's mostly a ramp. The cool big cable tower is there to hold everything up, because there's no room on the other side. The bridge goes over the light rail tracks and under the big powerlines.

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New Path Coming Soon!

When not picking fights with the geese, I've been observing the gradual construction of the new path around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. It's been a long slow journey, but stabilizing almost three miles of shoreline and a commensurate path is a lot of work. There's just a small stretch of path to go and a lot of grass to replace, but it looks like they will make it before the snow starts blowing. Speaking of construction, the greenway bridge is supposedly done and there is a Grand Opening party this afternoon. I'll be heading over at 4pm to join in the festivities and hopefully drag home a few pictures for the blog. The park system here is really impressive, there are trails all over and with the bridge done, you can take a trail by bike or foot from the mighty Mississippi all the way to the lakes. Other trails circle the city and I often bike from Uptown Minneapolis all the way to Downtown St. Paul on trails the whole way. So head out and enjoy the parks. Keep your chin up, enjoy the view, but watch your step, the geese are everywhere.

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Grand Red Oak Tree

Hug 'em, cut 'em, climb 'em either way, you gotta love 'em. Trees, glorious trees. They do so much for us: shelter, tools, heat, beauty and tasty clean oxygen. They patiently accept us and the squirrels, giving of themselves without complaint, but then, they are bigger than us. The most frustrating thing about the fall is how short the time is between when the trees turn color and when then winds from Canada blow them all off. I managed to get a few shots in before the oaks were stripped bare. Back in art school, one of the first lessons of landscapes is that trees are very hard to draw and make look real. There are so many patterns in how a tree grows that are very subtle. You look, you draw, when done, it looks like an arboreal burn victim. Working with Joe Paquet, a true master of trees, I learned about growth patterns, weight distribution, etc. Your ancient mind knows how a tree is put together, you don't. So drawing a tree can be like drawing a horse — not easy. That's what I like about photography. I don't have to convince you that it's a tree. I just have to find a way to find new views or simply celebrate it's splendid form. Here I found a couple classically-crooked oak limbs that eeked out an odd composition. The main limb runs right through the diagonal. If I drew this, you'd not believe it, but since it's a photo, you just ponder it. The trunk and the other branches create a nice vertical on the third and there you go. Yes, I was doing a composition dance below the tree to get this angle, but it was fun. Color. What's up? Yes, I changed the colors. I darkened and added vibrance to the sky. By bringing down the value of the sky, I closed the dynamic range of the image to support the darkness of the tree. If I had left the sky light, your eyes would not see the subtle texture in the bark and the leaves would have lost saturation. This is also why my site is black, I tend toward saturated color in my images and that looks better on a dark background. Think about a neon sign at night versus the day. Make time today to hug a tree. If the tree has lost it's leaves, it needs your love more than ever.

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The Guthrie Theater Observatory

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...

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Down by the River

Saturday I went on a mondo photo tour. Matt Armstead and I went to Theodore Wirth park to talk Nikon and take lots of pictures. Somehow I always end up with a list of expensive things I need after I talk with Matt. While we were there, Bob Kupbens called and wanted to go take pics of the riverfront. Matt couldn't go, but I did. This is one of the first shots I took there. There is some heavy post-processing going on with this pic. The reason for that is to emphasize the design of this image. It is very geometric, and I would love to try and paint this sometime. The group of shapes of the buildings are very rectilinear — a veritable forest of square lines. This is strongly offset by the long smooth curves of the bridge. Also, the stepping down line of the skyline re-enforces the curve and draws the eye down along the bridge. What originally caught my eye was the caissons in the river. Big yellow things in a sea of dark are very attractive. So why did I do so much processing? I wanted to flatten the image and force the abstract shapes by increasing the saturation, vibrance and contrast. The image now feels like an Edward Hopper painting to me. Which the river front always looked like to me with the railroad corridors and early 20th century architecture. We also went across the river to see the new Guthrie Theater building. I'll post some pics from there later this week.