One of the privileges of photographic life near Denver, Colorado is that you get some uniquely colorful holiday lights to play with. In particular, the Denver City and County building traditionally is bathed in a very… unrestrained choice of colored lights at night for the season. Call it gaudy, call it exuberant, call it tacky, the bottom line is that it’s a photographer magnet (we just can’t help ourselves).
Best of all, the folks running the building now turn off the street lights on Bannock Street in front of it every Sunday night when the building’s lit up — this makes it so much easier to capture the building in all its highly-saturated glory. So last Sunday, I got bundled up to handle our recent frigid night temperatures (clear sky, 17 degrees Fahrenheit) and went to town on the place.
The above photo was taken from near the end of the building’s south wing, if you were curious. This is definitely my favorite photo of the set, I really like how the snow in the foreground brings some of the chill to the viewer.
And not to play favorites, here’s the building seen from the end of its north wing. The ground here saw some serious sunshine, so the snow is mostly gone (in spite of sub-freezing highs since it fell).
And here’s the rather straightforward view taken from directly in front of the building, on the park side of Bannock. I took all these photos with my Olympus E-M5II camera (does a bit better at night than the E-M1) and the Olympus M.Zuiko 8mm f/1.8 fisheye — a mighty combination for work like this! Oh, and their advertised freeze-tolerance lived up to its billing for me.
Meanwhile — Happy New Year to all of you!