Philly City Hall

A look at part of the east facade of Philadelphia City Hall, with 1 Liberty Place, Helmut Jahn's postmodern homage to the Chrysler Building, in the background.

Head Butt at City Hall

Lumix LX5

I found a deal on a used LX5. I took it to work with me to try out on the streets near my office.

It's a little early, but so far I am pleased with its performance. The controls and menu are very similar to my other Lumix cameras, so there was practically zero learning curve needed for this little P&S. Another great feature is the fact that the LVF-1 EVF for my GF1 also fits onto the LX5.

--Warren

Reading Materials

Dan's Canon S90

I went out for a lunch time walk with Dan's S90 today, and I saw this person sitting between two rolls of newspaper dispensers reading something.

Hey, does this qualify as a "landmarks" project shot? That's City Hall in the background :).

--Warren

Baltimore City Hall

I got to take some "landmark" photos after all. Having a pocketable camera sure helps.

I went to a karaoke meetup late afternoon yesterday. The bar is just 1/2-block from the back side of City Hall, and the dramatic lighting of the dome prompted me to get a shot for our forum.

At ISO 800, the resolution and lack of noise is remarkable. The exposure was f/4.5 @ 1/25 sec with a focal length equivalent to 60mm. The lack of motion blur testifies to the effectiveness of the modern digicam image stabilization.

This is image was taken as a jpg, but I decided to open it in Camera Raw to see if it needed tweaking of exposure, color balance, etc. I just gave it a smidge more exposure (interstingly, left to its own devices, the camera did not blow out the highlights on the dome) and left everything else the same. In Photoshop CS3, I only used the Distort filter to correct the vertical perspective. Then a little cropping.

The only sharpening I did was after I did a Save for Web, in order to counteract the inherent softening in the resizing process.

To so some more pixel-peeping, click on this image to see a screen capture of a portion of the photo viewed at 100% in PS C3.

City Hall Reflection

Canon SD300

City Hall reflected in the San Francisco Ballet building.

--Warren

Four Fountains

Nikon D100, Tamron 24-135mm

Well, I thought this was kind of a whimsical sight, seen at City Hall, SF.

--Warren

San Francisco City Hall

Canon A570IS

This is one of the first shots that I made with the A570IS. I took it out with me at lunch time and took a few quick snapshots with it. My office is just a block away from City Hall.

The gold trim on the dome really stands out on a cloudy day.

Hey, we're coming up on our 4th(!!!) anniversary of the forum! Where is everyone?

On one hand, I'm glad that the forum is still alive and that there are still a handful of us that keep it that way, but on the other hand I'm a little disappointed that even though we have a large roster, many on the roster seem to have lost interest, perhaps permanently it seems.

--Warren