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Hollyhock House with Clouds

I’ve been experimenting and practicing long exposures for a couple of weeks now and I’m very happy with my results.  Despite the recent heat, we’re having a few days of clouds and drizzle, so I decided to head up to the top of Barnsdall Arts Park on Hollywood blvd. to make some photographs. The park is beautiful and sits on a hill with nice views. There is also a Frank Lloyd Wright house there, the Hollyhock House.

I spent several hours at the park and took many photographs.  When I came home to further study my results, I was very happy with this image of the Hollyhock House.  When I took this photograph, my goal was to capture the movement of the stormy clouds overhead, they seemed so still in the sky, but a long exposure would reveal them tossing and turning, expanding and contracting like breathing lungs.  I increased the contrast to deepen the blue sky to a dark shade of gray.  Clouds alone are difficult to photograph without a static foreground because without context there is no scale for their size and intensity.  I chose the beautiful western side of the Hollyhock House for this.  Against the weightlessness of the stirring clouds, the house looks like a heavy anchor, giving the image a sense of mass. I’m quite proud of this image.

Hollyhock House with Clouds

If you’d like some technical information, this is an eight-minute exposure at f/20, iso 50 (“L” setting) on a 5D Mark II with a 28mm f/1.8 lens.  I shot the image in RAW format and made minimal adjustments to contrast and tone in Adobe Lightroom 3 and Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 7th, 2011 at 9:38 pm. It is filed under Blog, Personal Projects and tagged with Barnsdall, black and white, fine art, hollyhock house, hollywood, long exposure, los angeles, photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.