Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Mo. | Canon 5D Mark II and 50mm f/1.4 lens | Exposed 1/640 sec. @ f/11, ISO 100.

Who says you can’t make a good picture in the middle of the day?

Over the weekend Elizabeth and I found ourselves in St. Louis for Independence Day, partly thanks to a hotel deal through Hotwire.com.  While I’ve been going to school at the University of Missouri for two years, and have spent some time in St. Louis in that time, I haven’t actually gone up to the Gateway Arch since a seventh-grade field trip back around 1997.  Frankly, I can’t even remember if I took a camera (taking a 35mm SLR was something I was never too keen to do back when I was in middle school).  But I do remember going up in the arch and feeling the structure sway back and forth in the wind.  Fun!  But it’s still standing there.  Unfortunately, getting up to the top of the arch is harder than I can recall from all those years ago: you have to go through a magnetometer, your bag through an X-Ray, and rangers are standing by to pat you down.  We actually tried two days in a row to go to the top, and both times the line for tickets was either painfully slow or, on the second day, not moving at all because the eight (eight!) employees behind the ticket counter weren’t selling tickets.  C’est la vie.(...)
Read the rest of Looking up at the Gateway to the West (315 words)

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | Permalink | 2 comments | Updates: architecture, EOS 5D Mark II, pictorial

Spiral Staircase in the Currituck Beach Light Station, Corolla, N.C. | Panasonic Lumix G1 and Olympus 9-18mm f/4-5.6 lens @ 9mm; exposed 1/20 sec. @ f/4, ISO 800.

While I had been up to the top of the lighthouse in Racine, Wis. before, when presented with the opportunity to go up to the top of another lighthouse in the Outer Banks, specifically the Currituck Beach Light Station in Corolla, N.C. (pronounced cuh-ra-lah, unlike the car by Toyota), I just couldn’t resist.  Sure, it was $7 per person, which is a bit steep, but Elizabeth and I were able to set our own pace.  There were no “groups” that went up–there are landings after every flight of stairs, so people can pass in both directions.  This is decidedly different from the lighthouse back home, which was much narrower.

In the end, these are my two favorite images.  Note that they’re both surprisingly sharp given an exposure time of 1/20 second.  If I had taken the Olympus PEN EP-2 along for this trip, I suppose that wouldn’t have been so great a feat to have a sharp image at such a slow shutter speed, but the Panasonic Lumix G1 does not have built-in image stabilization (instead, they put the stabilization mechanisms in the individual lenses, like Canon and Nikon).  That is a decided advantage of the Olympus method for image stabilization, but I like having the flip-out screen on the Lumix that the PEN series lacks.  To each their own.

As always, comments and criticism welcome!

Currituck Beach Light Station, Corolla, N.C. | Panasonic Lumix G1 and Olympus 17mm f/2.8 lens; exposed 1/20 @ f/5.6, ISO 400.

Content © 2010 David Kennedy | Permalink | Comment! | Updates: architecture, Lumix G1, Olympus 17mm lens, Olympus 9-18mm

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre: "Ballroom, Fort Wayne Hotel" from their series "The Ruins of Detroit"

How is it that only just now did I find Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s “The Ruins of Detroit?”  I know I am not even close to the first person to link to their Web site in awe.  Nevertheless, I feel it’s important to direct people reading this to their gallery.  It’s a collection of images of “people without people,” and reminds me of Stephen Wilkes’ Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom, which has been a great inspiration to my own landscape and architectural photography (landscapes of buildings, really).

Of course, the subject matter between my own work and that of Marchand and Meffre or Wilkes is entirely different.  It is their style that is particularly wonderful because there is a great deal of self-expression in the image, but the style invites the viewer into the image.  The photographs are not difficult to read.  Quite to the contrary: the haunting–and hauntingly beautiful–photographs of Marchand and Meffre communicate clearly the dire conditions of Detroit.

And that the images are well-composed documents of light and shadow doesn’t hurt matters.  While some may argue that ugly subjects must be made to look ugly for them to affect social change, I believe that people are too-often beat over the head with message-laden ugly images, and become desensitized to them.  What Marchand and Meffre offer is a fresh perspective that invites viewers to see the beauty of the decay before realizing the ugly social ramifications of spaces like these in urban America–scenes like these belong on movie sets, not on our streets–and what it means for the thousands of people who aren’t pictured.

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | Permalink | Comment! | Updates: architecture, Detroit, ruins

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | Permalink | Comment! | Columbia Missourian, Updates: architecture, multimedia, slideshow

View of Elm and Hitt Streets, Columbia, Mo. Canon 5D Mark II and 24mm f/3.5 L TS-E lens

The other morning I found myself on the rooftop of the Hitt Street parking garage at sunrise.  It had been a long night of paper-writing and I decided to take a break before finishing it up and going to bed for a nap before class later that day.

While I’ve owned a tilt/shift lens since 2005 and have used it extensively for landscape and architectural photography, mostly for the Scheimpflug effect, but I have never before intentionally made use of the tilt function to distort my subject.  Vince LaForet’s “tiny landscapes” inspired me to try my hand at the technique.

Of course, my first few attempts were utter failures because, while I was able to compose the image properly and could “see” my subjects transforming into “toys” in front of me, I then stopped down the aperture to get proper depth-of-field.  Why not, I thought–that’s the way it’s done, right?  Wrong.

More after the jump…

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Read the rest of Toy Village (277 words)

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | Permalink | 2 comments | Updates: architecture, perspective control, photography, tilt and shift, tiny landscape, toy car

View of the MU School of Journalism from Hitt Street Parking Garage, Columbia, Mo.

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | Permalink | Comment! | Updates: architecture, Columbia, dusk, landscapes, photography, skyline, twilight

Nikon D300 w/ 24-70 f/2.8 and SB-900 triggered by CLS. Exposed 1/250 sec. @ f/14, ISO 250

For the past few days I’ve been peering over at the other side of the fence to see what Nikon has to offer with regard to off-camera lighting. I had heard about CLS–the Creative Lighting System–for some time, but few here at Mizzou seem to be using it. Finally, I just decided to check it out for myself, so I borrowed a D300 and an SB900 Speedlight and discovered how ridiculously easy it is to control the flash unit from the camera in either fully-manual or ETTL modes. From the perspective of a Canon user, it’s just sick.

More after the jump…
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Read the rest of Blending new techniques with old passions (370 words)

Content © 2009 David Kennedy | Permalink | Comment! | Updates: architecture, CLS, Creative Lighting System, light, lighting, lit, Nikon, strobe, Strobist, wireless flash