Weekly Photo Challenge: Abstract

In the Spring the St. Louis Art Museum hosts one of my favorite exhibits, Art in Bloom. The challenge for some local floral artists is to create a work based on a piece from the museum that is assigned to them.

ISO 800 10mm f/5.0 1/20

ISO 800 5mm f/3.2 1/30

ISO 800 10mm f/5.0 1/30

This was one of my favorites from this year.  It was this detail that caught my eye:

ISO 800 10mm f/5.0 1/13

The ribbon, an almost exact detail from the painting, I think made the arrangement go from abstract to concrete.

This exhibit is usually crowded, for that reason I take my point and shoot camera. I usually set my ISO to 800, turn the flash off, and then let the camera make the rest of the decisions.  This low maintenance approach leaves me with nice photos and more time to focus on the art I am looking at.  I was lucky this year to have time to see the exhibit twice, once in the morning on its first full day and once near the end of the weekend in the evening.  It was interesting to me how much the arrangements had changed over the few days.

What do you think, do you like this take on the painting? Do you have a favorite yearly art exhibit?  Do you think that the time of day changes how you interact with the art you are looking at? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Orange

In terms of this week’s photo challenge, orange, I guess I just got lucky.  Today was the start of Art in Bloom at the St. Louis Art Museum. The challenge for local floral gurus in the area is to create a floral arrangement that represents a piece of art work they are assigned.  It is a fun and very crowded exhibit to see.  For this blog post I chose to show the floral arrangement of Catherine Thoele who was assigned Octagonal Jar with Design of Cherry Trees, Peonies, and Chrysanthemums.

ISO 400 8mm 0ev f/4.5 1/30

ISO 400 8mm 0ev f/4.5 1/80

ISO 400 8mm 0ev f/4.5 1/13

ISO 640 8mm 0ev f/4.5 1/40

Of the ones I saw, this was my favorite interpretive arrangement.  I loved the orange of the flowers, but one of the details that I appreciated was the leaves that had blue paint flecks on them, it was a nice tie-in to the original art work.

The challenges as a photographer to get these photos included low light, no flash allowed, and the crowds.  I chose to take my point and shoot, it is easier to handle in a crowded situation.  I used two different settings to get the photos.  One was Auto.  The other was a program mode that allows me to shoot macro.  I got some nice close-ups of individual photos in that mode.  As far as post-editing, I have kept that to a minimum. I did some cropping on a few.  The biggest adjustment I made was on the vase photo, where I applied an Iris blur filter.  I made that choice because the background was truly distracting.

I think it is because I enjoy looking at interpretations of art that this is one of my favorite exhibits of the year at the St. Louis Art Museum.  What do you think? should interpretations like this be featured in museums? Also, it was mentioned in the challenge to try a different gallery format for the photos.  I generally insert my photos one at a time in a fairly large format, so this gallery is a change for me.  What do you think of the format?  I think I can get away with it in this post, but I don’t think I be changing my normal format any time soon.  Your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Ancient

This week’s travel theme at Where’s My Backpack? is ancient. I was at the St. Louis Art Museum this past week for a special exhibit where I saw this painting and a floral interpretation of it:

ISO 1600 10mm 0ev f/4.5 1/15

The painting is Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion by John Martin, painted in 1812.  The floral arrangement is by Ivy Baebler of the Federated Garden Clubs of MO.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was going to think of this exhibit before I went.  It turns out, I really liked it.  Of course, because the flowers fade quickly, it is an exhibit that lasts only a few days and is very crowded.  The difficulty in shooting something like this starts with those crowds.  I was also kind of surprised at the number of people who were touching the flowers.  I guess to me it just seemed like the floral arrangements were created works of art and touching them would potentially mess up the composition.  That aside, it was hard for my point and shoot to capture all the detail of both the floral work and the painting.  I tried though, just to give the feel of the exhibit.

Have you ever been to an exhibit like this? I’ll admit I hadn’t.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Curves

I was at the St. Louis Art Museum this morning, so I thought I would see what I could find for this week’s photo challenge.  The theme this week is curves, and here is my little gallery:

ISO 800 10mm 0ev f/4.5 1/13

ISO 800 7mm 0ev f/4 1/6

ISO 800 12mm 0ev f/5 1/8

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f.2.7 1/50

Curves are pretty easy to find in art.  I picked a variety of mediums to represent that.  Photographing art can be a bit of a trick.  For this outing I used my Canon Powershot.  A few weeks ago when shooting in a museum I used my Canon 50D.  The biggest difference between these two posts is really the weight of the two cameras.  Taking a point and shoot really is easier and the results aren’t bad.  Since I couldn’t use the flash, I did bump up the ISO to 800.  When shooting in a museum you do have to take a moment to think about the angle you want to shoot from.  Two big concerns for me are always glare and the background.  So, generally I try to get as close as possible and then sometimes crop the photo later.

How about you? what are your museum tips and tricks? feel free to leave them in comment section below.  If you have written a blog post about it, feel free to leave a link.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Liquid

This week’s theme over at Where’s my backpack? gave me the excuse to go back to a photo a took a few months ago.  If you take photos you have probably had this happen to you, you see a great subject but the light is awful.  Sometimes with photos like that, I edit them later into HDR images which is what I did with this photo:

HDR using Photomatix

This is a view of the St. Louis Art Museum that I thought would be interesting.  I took several shots of the fountains that day because they are quite nice.  When you see the original below, I think you will be surprised at what I managed to salvage:

ISO 200 28mm -1.67eb f/22 1/200

In order to make the HDR image I first created two additional copies of the original photo.  In Aperture I changed the exposure balance of the copies, one to a 0 ev, the other to +1.  Then I combined the three images in Photomatix.  The resulting photo I liked best was one of the “painterly” versions.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Geometry

Geometry, that was my favorite math in high school, and it is also the topic of this week’s photo challenge at WordPress.  I don’t do a lot of architecture photography but this shot is a picture of a stairwell in the St. Louis Art Museum that caught my eye.  I think it fits for this week’s challenge as well:

ISO 1600 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/40

I took this photo with my point and shoot.  I tried the shot on a few different settings, but my favorite was this one using the blue tone in the black and white setting.

Cheers!

Photo Walk yields the Park Police…

and this photo:

ISO 500 28mm f/22 1/125

This park police officer was nice enough to let me take this photo while he was out in Forest Park.  This photo was taken outside the St. Louis Art Museum.  I thought it would be neat to get a shot of the two horses lined up.  It was super bright out at the time though, so it was hard to get a really “nice” shot.  I was able to fix it up a bit in Aperture.

I was in the park because I was working on two different assignments for school.  It was also a beautiful day, so a nice excuse for a walk!

Cheers!