State Theatre Marquee

This is a close-up shot of the marquee of the State Theatre in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This theatre was designed by C. Howard Crane and built in 1942. Crane also designed the ornate Fox Theater in Detroit. Most of the exterior of the theater is still intact, but inside the theater was cut up to create 4 theaters over two floors. Later the bottom two theaters were removed and converted to retail space.

I've always been attracted to the signage of this building. It has great Art Deco elements and I like the vivid colors. Even though the sign has seen some wear, it is still quite impressive. I was going through some shots I had taken of the theater and I was playing around with the zoom tool in Lightroom. I had zoomed in really close in one image and I really liked the extreme close up. It gave the image a bit more of an abstract feeling to it. I decided I needed to go back and use my 70-300mm lens (2x crop factor) and take some close up shots. I've posted a series of them on my Flickr account. I choose this one to post here because I liked the variety of elements in the shot. I like the color and shape of the sign, combined with the pattern of the brick and the shadow line along the right side.

The finished image has had some work to get it to where it is. The image above is the raw image as it came out of the camera. The shot was taken mid-afternoon and the sun was shining directly on the sign. This had the effect of creating some nice shadows, but it also washed the color out. I really wanted to emphasize both the color of the sign, but also the age of the sign as well. In order to do that I worked to improve the contrast, and pump up the colors. Most of the work was done in Lightroom 2.0. I used the blacks slider to add a bit of contrast. I used the vibrance slider to bring out some additional color in the brick and I used the individual saturation and luminosity sliders to bump up particular colors in the sign.

When I was mostly finished in Lightroom, I took the image over to Photoshop CS3. I noticed that the color of the wall seemed to have a bit of a greenish cast, so I used the color balance tool to make it a little redder and browner. The original shot also had more dark wall to the right which I felt distracted from the main element. I liked the shadow cast by the bricks so I kept that, but I trimmed away most of the dark area of the image. The other thing I did was to skew things a bit to straighten things out. I had to shoot this from down below and I didn't have the benefit of a tilt/shift lens, so I used the free transform tool in CS3 to move things around a bit. I finished up with some sharpening and a little vignette.

Image Details

The image was taken with an Olympus E-3 camera. The lens was the Zuiko 70-300 which gives a 35mm effective focal length of 140-600. The shot was taken with the lens zoomed to 92mm (184mm). Exposure was 1/250 @ f/13 at ISO 100.

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Text and images are Copyright © 2008 James W. Howe - All rights reserved

Dante's Inferno?

Dante's Inferno? Not really. It's actually a shot of the tunnel which runs between the A terminal and the B/C terminals at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. The tunnel is quite interesting. It has moving sidewalks going in both directions. On each side of the tunnel there are a series of etched glass panels which are lit from behind. Colors shift from reds to greens to blues to purples. At the same time ambient music plays and the color changes to the mood and beat of the music.

Over Thanksgiving, I found myself with some time to kill at Metro airport while I was between flights. I walked down to the tunnel to take some shots. Unfortunately the tunnel is mostly dark and all I was able to do was take some hand held shots. I wanted to capture the movement of the people, but I wanted the fixtures in the tunnel to be sharp. I tried to keep steady but wasn't entirely successful. When I was processing the image I decided to experiment with different treatments. The image above was created with a couple simple changes in Photoshop.

The first change I did was to crop the image to eliminate the top and bottom and focus on the center of the tunnel. I took this shot with an Olympus E-500 which has a 4/3 aspect ratio and the crop makes the image more panoramic. I then did some minor exposure adjustments in raw and then opened opened the image in Photoshop. From there, I duplicated the layer and selected the Linear Light layer blending mode. This created a more intense and more abstract image. I then added a Hue/Saturation layer and shifted the color from green to red. This created a darker, more ominous looking shot. Some minor curves adjustments and the image was completed. I like the way the light panels and the reflections on the floor look like fire emanating from the end of the tunnel. Since travel can be Hell sometimes, I thought the treatment was appropriate.