Oe’r Vaulted Microstock
On walkabout for images in West Los Angeles, I came upon what is for many people a major Los Angeles attraction, the Los Angeles Couny Museum of Art. Truth be told, I had worked there once, and walked past hallways full of awesome art to get to my desk. Experiencing the attraction value as a visitor once again, I perceived a uniqueness to the broadly stunning entrance that begged my shutter finger hence.
I am not a formal architecture enthusiast, however sometimes the eye is smart enough to nab photos that only later do I realize become something special with desktop processing. Most art museums of note have significant architecture attached. This is due to a commitment to enlightenment by the museum directors and a consensual working relationship between the form of a museum’s organic space and the purpose of it raison d’etre to allow experiential congruence to an artistic product of multiplied impacts.
The vaulted arches of LACMA clearly harked back to European cathedral school of building. But like many incidences of my photo grabs with the right time of day, cold clear air, and a new vista or strikingly visual image fodder of some magnitude, the challenge to capture both the form of the grandeur and its impact struck.
As with many walkabout photo grabs, I worked first get real clarity and shots of my subject material. In the editing session I noticed that the resolution was so high on a lot of my museum shots they were almost too difficult to examine for uniform tones and deep and near/far crispness. But cropping the sides of the shot generated a lot more visual drama inside the frame. The “forced” intersection of the vertices of the vaulted “flying buttresses” to the near wall created a perspective repetition of the arched “tunnel”. Certainly the word “cathedral” came to mind many times. But the image files allowed me to convey the scale, the excitement and the grandeur of the structure created in me.
The colors of the main entrance interior were functionally as dark as the overcast cloudy morning would allow. But within the image this merely put the ceiling and roofline in relief. When taking microstock exteriors, one tends to pick framing subjects against dramatically contrasting or neutral backgrounds.
In this image, no matter how many billions of dollars of worth in works of art line the walls, the ceiling’s form enjoins the heavens with amplitude and space. This is another image file I am going to save for sophisticated actions in online workshops. Blending viewable effects and filters will make the august structural drama really sing in my photo gallery.
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