Flickr Lounge: buildings and architecture

I turned it into black and white to try it for Compositionally Challenged, and ended up having other photos I liked better for that . . . but I preferred it in black and white to color, and so I've posted that version.

I was in downtown Indianapolis to watch a friend become a US citizen. These buildings were the view out the window from the reception afterward: the Indiana state capitol.

In the USA, we have to rely on courthouses and a few churches (and an occasional library or other public building) for our grand buildings, and many of those are simply utilitarian too.

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Flickr Lounge: books

I'm practicing still-life photography, and for this session I decided to use items that are old or look like they could be old. The selection (not everything appears in any one photo): a table that is only two years old, chairs that are probably a few decades old, a perfume bottle and a pill bottle that were given to me as gifts several years ago, pens that belong to my husband but that he contributed to the photo shoot when I saw items I had laid out on the table and guessed I was taking photos, Indian head pennies and buffalo nickels, a jasper necklace I made, a chain necklace with decorative keys that I made, roses that I dried, and some books. The books: two leather journals that I bought this year because I like how they look; the heart one is for myself and the other is for my husband (though he doesn't know it yet--it was put away out of sight when he saw my props), and two old Bibles. A couple of photos also include the base of a candleholder.

Tags:   06-Dec-2020 leather old books old coins sepia the flickr lounge WPD23Objects

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CC: black and white in camera
Flickr Lounge: wood

Re black and white in camera: In the old days you'd buy black and white film. I once took a driving trip through Arizona to take photos, and I bought a new camera and loaded my old one with black and white film so that I could take one or two photos per stop in black and white.

Unfortunately I forgot that the old camera didn't register the first two or three photos on each roll and you had to take some "fake" shots simply to advance the roll, and my first stop was the one of which I most wanted black-and-white photos: the Superstition Mountains. (I grew up in Arizona and loved their rugged beauty.)

But that's a different story.

These days one can easily convert to black-and-white in post-processing, and I do not shoot photos in black and white. In fact, I have two new cameras and don't totally know the features of either one yet, so I "cheated" by choosing the selective color and turning it to purple because there was no purple in the frame.

I'd rather do the conversion in post-processing because if I decide I want the shot in black and white, I can always change it to black and white later. But if I decide I want a black-and-white shot in color instead, too bad.

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CC: black and white
The Flickr Lounge: black and white

Indiana has a lot of interesting old barns, grain silos, etc. But the only reason I photograph them (or, really, any building) is that they interest my husband. I'm generally a keep-out-any-manmade-object photographer, avoiding even telephone wires (or cropping them out) if I possibly can. But today he drove me to find sandhill cranes (and also, it turns out, bald eagles), and I in turn also took shots of things that interest him.

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I posted the color photos of these shots later, but this time I posted the black and white versions first. This is a macro shot, by the way, with the image an inch and a half across or less.

I find it interesting that the smaller bubbles have more hearts, which seems counterintuitive. My friend Kevin (with a degree from Caltech) explained it this way: "The hearts appear smaller and more packed together in the bubbles because of the curvature of the bubble surfaces. The larger bubbles have more gradual curves, closer to flat. The smaller bubbles have sharper curves, so the refraction effect is greater, thus more hearts."

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