Granted, this isn’t normally the kind of “Mayan” architecture I blog about, but in a distant sense, it’s related. Today I’m going to show you a bit of Denver history — the historic Mayan Theater, one of a few surviving examples of Mayan Revival style architecture.
Looking to the west in Rocky Mountain National Park…
This shot looks up Moraine Park (a glacier-cut valley) to the continental divide. The peaks here are relatively low — only getting up to a bit over 12,000 feet above sea level (Colorado has many “14ers,” 14,000 foot tall mountains, further south).
We recently did a bit of family travel — on our way from Denver to Phoenix, we were fortunate enough to have relatively clear skies and a late afternoon flight. Perfect for some aerial twilight photography of various spots in Colorado and the four corners region of the U.S.
First up for you, Colorado Springs (top of frame) seen over the snow covered Rampart Reservoir, not far west of town.
Colorado Springs is one of those places I normally see while driving through (in this case, on I-25) — from that perspective, the mountains form a wall to the west of the city. But from above, the fact that the mountains are essentially a (tall) rumpled plateau is much more evident.
A muted, somewhat ghostly shot for you — from Upper Antelope Canyon in Arizona:
A few things to note if you want to visit either Upper or Lower Antelope Canyon for photography:
By far one of the biggest adjustments we had to contend with when visiting Cuba was food. Not the food we ate — not at all. Tourists get treated to food of a quality and in a quantity comparable to what you’d find in visiting many places across the globe.
But the locals don’t get off so easily.
This is a bodega, the Cuban version of a ration center. We visited in mid-month, when clients were few and the stock (as you can see from the shelves) thin. From what we were told, though, bodegas are very busy places on the first of the month — when Cuban citizens can come in with their ration books and collect (at relatively low price) their month’s stock of staple foods.
Continue reading
A while back, I bought a used Olympus E-PM2 off eBay and had it converted to full-spectrum usage (i.e., I had the anti-IR filter removed from its sensor). Add an IR filter to its lens, and you can get some interesting effects with the setup — so I took it up to the mountains to the Breckenridge International Snow Sculpture Championships:
After split-toned processing, this is an infrared image of the “Dia de Muertos” snow sculpture, created by a team from Wisconsin. This sculpture won the “Artists’ Choice” award this year, well-deserved if you ask me. The level of detail that the sculptors could achieve with packed snow is impressive.
A few weeks back, the publishing company Rocky Nook sent me a copy of a recently released title by Brian Matiash — it’s called The Visual Palette: Defining Your Photographic Style. Now that I’ve had time to read through the book and digest it, I thought a review / critique would be helpful to this blog’s readers.
At its core, The Visual Palette is about the process of developing / uncovering / growing your own personal photographic style, and learning to apply it in your work. About being personal and intimate in your photography, rather than distant and formulaic. Continue reading
Of the many challenges of life in today’s Cuba, housing must rank among the greatest. There’s not enough of it, much of the available housing stock is in terrible shape, and the Cuban legal code makes it hard to legally transfer ownership — so moving households is a big challenge.
In this shot from above (courtesy of a hotel upper-floor window), you can see how some units were turned into small yards after their roofs collapsed. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
A street scene from the 2015 Denver Parade of Lights:
