This is another picture that I have mixed feelings about.  Let me cover the good first, since that's pretty short...

The good...  It's a really cool building.  It's also got some fairly rich detail and color, although my photo doesn't show that.  The garden is also quite nice when it's "alive".  Right now, it's pretty much all dead other than the yellow things that are just starting bloom.  This is the Smithsonian Institution Building (commonly called Smithsonian Castle).  I forgot what's inside it, but I just like the building.
Before I get into the bad stuff, here's the pic:

Ok, let's get on with the bad parts.  I've already mentioned the dead looking trees, so I won't harp on that.  I was walking to work in the morning because I knew it was going to rain on the way home.  Normally I walk to the train in the evening if I have time, so I'm used to evening light conditions, not morning.  The lighting here is horrible.  Everything is faded and washed out.  The colors were incredibly weak and I've boosted them quite a bit just to get some kind of contrast out of this picture.

It's an "I was here" picture.  While the composition technically fits the "rule of three" (er... well, it did before I cropped it), it's a dead-on shot with no interesting angles or anything.  Could it possible be any more symmetrical?  BORING!

Now the sky... WHAT SKY?  I wasn't using the polarizing filter, which might have helped slightly.  Ah, who am I kidding?  A polarizer would have gotten a slightly bluer tone to the sky, but it still would have been drab and boring.  There was absolutely no texture in the sky... it was a dull and dreary day. 

Finally, there was a bit of barrel distortion caused by my lens.  I had to tweak that a bit with Photoshop by altering the perspective slightly.  No big deal, but it unfortunately put a few "jaggies" in on the right tower windows.  Hard to see on the picture here, but if you click on it to go to Flickr and then view the large size, they're definitely there.

In short, I like the building and the picture isn't terrible.  I'd never waste my time printing this though.  While there are quite a few negative bits to this picture, they all teach me something about what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong.  That's pretty much the point of this whole exercise, which is why I ended up posting this one. ;)

Now I'm off to go take some shots with my new Tamron lens.  Laters!

Posted by smthng | 0 Comments [Edit]

Friday, March 16, 2007 7:10 PM