I have been Photographing the Wonder exhibit at the Renwick Gallery off and on for the last few weeks. The staff have been awesome and it is truly a unique museum within the Smithsonian Institution. Everyone should see this show before it comes down.
Today I was photographing at the Capitol Stones in Rock Creek Park in Washington D.C. The stones are remnants of the renovation to the Capitol in 1958. For whatever reason these stones from the east facade they could not be re-used so they were deposited unceremoniously here. They are numbered and signed by the craftsmen that created them. While they have tremendous historical value to our nation they sit here in the woods with moss growing on them. It’s a disappointing testament to our own countries history.
I photographed at the Eastern State Penitentiary off and on over several weeks. As long as you get a membership you don’t have to pay a tripod permit and they are very photographer friendly. It’s a museum now but as a working prison it has an amazing history.
Today I was photographing at the United States Holocaust Museum. It is a heavy museum to take in and everyone should visit it at least once. When it was under construction in the 1990s I volunteered my services to do some copy work of photographs of people lost in the Holocaust. I don’t know if they were ever used in the Hall of Faces but it’s possible one or two could be hanging up there.
After photographing the interior of the Peabody Library I was able to quickly process and print the panorama in time for the student show at Montgomery College. This is me hanging at the student show at in the gallery for student work. This became a really important image for me. It became the first image that I really felt communicated the space the way I see it. For me this image validated the entire multiple row HDR panorama process I have been trying to master.
The staff at the Peabody Library are awesome! They allowed me to photograph in the interior of the library and were very accommodating. This was a really successful day of shooting panoramas. I was there all day but could have stayed for week photographing in that space!
I visited the Andrew Smith Gallery in Santa Fe New Mexico. They had an extensive Ansel Adams exhibit including these four Moonrise, Hernandez photographs. I am in awe! Each is printed differently than the other, none is better than the other just different. The actually let me handle on Ansel Adams print in my own hands! I was grinning for days!
I was photographing a bridge outside of Santa Fe New Mexico and I couldn’t quite get the angle I needed from the ground. So I improvised and utilized the roof of my SUV. This was an early experimentation for me of multiple row HDR panoramas. From a technical standpoint the image worked. It wasn’t the greatest photograph but it proved the technique I had been working on is plausible.
© Joshua Dunn Photography 2016