And they said you couldn’t take a good picture on a crappy gray day. I was out shooting Sunday with Bob and went to an old classic, the Weisman Museum. This Frank Gehry masterpiece is snugged up on the edge of the UM campus and overlooks the 35W Bridge collapse site. This building is beautiful on a blue sunny day and glares like a frozen lake. Bob and I were there on a completely overcast day and I wasn’t sure what I would get. If you check out Bob’s picture, you can see what that day really looked like. I abused Lightroom to get the color and texture into this image.

I’m getting sufficiently jealous of all the other bloggers’ twilight shots of downtown from the pedestrian bridge over 35W, so I hope to get out and try it this evening.

A model train set? Nope, this is the North Yard of the BNSF Railroad that I visitied with Bob Kupbens on Saturday. What makes it “miniaturized” is a tilt-shift effect that makes the depth of field appear to be very shallow. Depth of field is the area that is in focus. This is determined by several factors: aperture, focal length and the distance to the subject. When the distance to the subject is as far away as these trains are, everything is in focus. The effect is normally only seen in close-up objects, like a small train set. That’s what makes this seem like it’s miniaturized.

How then did I get the effect on something this large? I could use a bellows camera and tilt-shift the lens, but there are several cool tools that allow you to do this with a 35mm SLR. But that’s not how I did it. The most powerful photography tool was easier to employ — Photoshop.

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…

Had a visitor in my neighborhood today. I’ve already professed my fondness for gunpowder, but hydraulic anything is pretty neat too.

I spent some time a while back watching a tower crane assembled and I finally get how they add sections to make them taller; but now I have another crane mystery. How do these things work? I know how hydraulics work, but these big telescoping booms make my head itch. I know there’s not one big hydraulic ram inside the boom, that won’t work. They have to be integrated into the sections somehow. Where are the rams and lines and what do they look like? What’s pushing against what? If you know of a good cut-away illustration, please link to it as a comment, I need to know this.

I asked the guy working on it and he started explaining hydraulics. After trying to explain my question I felt like I was asking a squirrel about how a tree gets water up from the roots and he keeps showing me the acorns. Besides, I didn’t want to pester a guy with ten-pound wrench in his hand working a crane that probably costs $500 and hour.

Back to the picture: what did I do here? I centered the subject because I wanted to show the weight of the tackle — you don’t get to see this end of a crane much either. By centering an image, it makes it a little jarring, which is bad for nature & people, but it makes sense here.

This crane has seen some use. The industrial scuffed-up nature influenced me to give it a “direct positive” look: that’s the torqued-out contrast and saturation. I think it reminds me of Legos, so the color processing goes with the giant-toy appeal of the crane. I took it a step further and gave you a larger image than I usually do as well to add to the effect I’m going for. I’m trying to recreate for you the experience I had when I wandered out for my walk and found this massive machine jammed into my narrow little street & hemmed in by trees.

I hope you’ve been inspired to get some serious work done this Friday. Hop up into that big gear and crank — ’cause tomorrow’s Saturday!

I’ve lived in Minneapolis for a long time, but as usual, it took having someone from out of town to get me to see the sites in my home town. The TFTTF Photography Workshop expedition to Fort Snelling gave me a chance to chill out with some heavy field artillery. No matter how old, boys will be boys and a bag of gunpowder the size of a kitten is a rollicking good time.

The deafening blast of the cannon was a true dude delight, but my experience there had an additional geek delight sound added to it. A small contingent of us photographers were gathered together to record the cannon fire and we all had the same idea and technique. We watched the soldier on the left bring the golf-club-sized matchstick down to the back of the gun and when he got close, we all held down the triggers on our DSLRs — a chorus of 3, 5 and 11(!) frames-per-second cameras clicked away hoping to capture the blast.

This weekend is the last of the season for the fort to be open, so I might head back. If you get a chance, the cannon is fired at 1:00pm and 4:00pm. If you don’t think that’s worth the price of admission, then go check out the old-time cooking at the commander’s house and leave the marching field for us boys and our toys…

Here’s the new Mitchster.com mascot. This is a 30 second exposure of a glow-in-the-dark duckie. I set it up on glass to get the reflection.

Welcome to Day Three of the TFTTF Workshop (explained below Oct. 11). We went on an excursion to Historic Fort Snelling. The assignment was: Find something fake at Fort Snelling and use a predetermined focal length - I chose 28mm. I went to see the doctor and found on his shelf this little bottle hiding on his shelf, tormenting me in his bad light. Once everyone else left, I asked the ‘doctor’ if I could move things around. He said sure, and I set this image up while he continued to try lighting some wet logs in the fire place. I think I had greater success than he did. The light from the window cast some great shadows through the rippled glass and by using a big aperture, I was able to narrow the Depth of Field to draw the eye to my intended subject.