Profiling Light

Prologue: Chris Smith from Out of Chicago turned me onto this sculpture. Please check out his work. Nobody knows this city, photographically like Chris, except maybe the guys he hangs out with. Right Matt/Brian?
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The Grande Disco Sculpture in front of the Medical School at the University of Chicago is a photographers honey hole, offering shot opportunities from every angle.

Actually, that’s not far from the Creator’s vision for this piece of art, as I will discuss in this post.

Arnaldo Pomodoro is an Italian sculptor. He was born on 23 June 1926, in Morciano, Romagna, Italy. He currently lives and works in Milan.

It turns out that there are 6 of these sculptures around the world.
1) … This one at the University of Chicago.
2) … Piazza Medical Building, Bana Populare, Milan
3) … Donald Kendall Gardens, Pepsico Hdq. Purchase, NY
4) … Theatro Strehler, Milan
5) … Bofa Plaza, Charlotte NC
6) … Georg Buchner Monument, Darnstadt, Germany

Ok, to the point ….

The plague in front of one of these sculptures reads in part; “Grande Disco – The social challenge of art today, in my opinion, is to start a dialogue with the people. I hope that is what happens here with The Grande/Disco.”

Certainly I think he accomplished his vision with this piece. I can’t imagine any two people looking at this without breaking into some sort of conversation. Is it “The Death Star?” “Who would dream something like this up?” “Why or “What the (add your own noun or euphemism)?” Clearly, it evokes the motion of dialogue its creator desired.

But, it creates a motion of another sort. Physical motion.

Every angle and point of view offers new textures and lines and shapes to explore. As a photographer (especially as one who began in the macro genre) I could spend hours examining and photographing the bits and pieces of this work of Art.

Grande Disco offers thousands of shot opportunities and I can only imagine that number increases exponentially every time the light changes.

Take this one, for example …

How many “faces” or other little treats did our friend Arnaldo include in this piece.

Oh by the way, along with the physical workout, I repeatedly engaged in dialogue. “Hey Chris, did you see this?” was spoken often.

Mission Accomplished Mr. Pomodoro.

Here are a few other sampling s of what I saw…

Leading Lines

It’s like a small futuristic city, with highways running at every angle towards the high-rises and other corporate structures.

Add contrast and color and go slightly tighter with the lens and more of a Machine like view appears.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking. Thanks for Looking.

First, my disclaimer. I am not a software engineer or a graphics application power user. I am a simple amateur photographer that had a question, set about to generate an answer, made an observation and am sharing it for what it’s worth.

This is also not a review for Light Room 4, there are plenty of those and they are easy to find. So, if I didn’t lose you yet, read on…

I’ve been taking a serious quantity of photographs over the last 5 years and don’t have a particularly simple or concise way of managing them. There are a number of great tools for this on the market, just never invested the time or money.

Because I’ve started becoming active in Flickr and Google+, as soon as Light Room 4 hit the market there was a tremendous amount of chatter about the improvements. So, I decided to download the trial version for a test drive. The application overall is impressive, but for a guy whose lived with simple tools, there is a pretty big learning curve.

So, the first question, is the gain worth the learning pain to me. (The operative words are “to me” as Adobefites will argue the affirmative).

Frankly, I’ve been leaning towards the “No” answer. Any software that warrants the generation of thousands of learning books, videos, seminars and its own convention is probably more difficult or robust than I need.

But, then I happen to compare the output of 2 files converted from RAW. One processed in DXO Optics and the other from Light Room. I was impressed.

DXO has been my definitive standard for RAW processing but now I am not so sure.
So, for the use and interest of others and to preserve my results, I thought I’d post comparative samples of 3 RAW converters.

DXO Optics, Light Room and Canon’s own DPP.
Note, my comments are my opinion, if you want science, go find a scientist.

All the samples started off in 800x format. The crops are 100%. Click on the images to bring up the larger view. All of the images are processed in their default settings.

DXO has some advantage here in that by default it applies varying amounts of sharpening, lens correction and noise reduction. (Based on the camera model and lens used not the image content. The initiated should really go read about the science in DXO Optics it’s pretty cool.)

I have also broken this post down into pages so that I could use larger images and be verbose about my observations on each. Click on the page number below this post to continue.