New Stock Images – March 5, 2011

My first image this week is one of a series that I did on a pressure cooker steaming in the kitchen. I wanted this to look realistic rather than isolated, and show the power of the steam:

The next morning I was attracted by the look of the sunlight on a small puppet that hangs in the window – it looked like it was peering outside and making you wonder what is out there:

I then made the trip down to DC on Saturday and tried a new approach of just taking one lens on the camera and seeing how that altered my photography. The one I chose was the 50mm f1.4 – partly because I was planning to visit the Library of Congress and thought its wider aperture would be helpful. It is surprising how much you need to move about with a prime lens! Shots of the building across the street would have been a simple matter of twisting the zoom ring – here I needed to back up against the wall of the building opposite!

As we walked along the road, I saw this shot of the Supreme Court with a carved light, that I thought was different to the ones normally seen of that building, so I lined myself up for that shot:

Finally, I took a range of images inside the Library of Congress, a neoclassical building built in the late 1800s and ornately decorated with brightly painted ceilings, statues, arches and an overwhelming level of detail. The light was reasonably bright inside, although I had to bump up the ISO to 800 and use noise reduction in Lightroom. I thought this image was similar to a painting by Escher – an almost impossible set of stairs and arches: