This Old Opera House

This Old Opera House
Originally uploaded by Thorpeland

While taking a recent walk around the Denton town square, I was looking around the old Opera house/Recycled Books & CD's building, trying to find an interesting photo. It has just finished raining and the skies were a flat grey. Nothing I shot seemed to really be of any interest to me.

I walked around the square one more time looking for new subjects. But as I came back around to the Opera House building, the clouds began to break and cracks in the clouds began to let a little sun glare through. I immediately knew this might give me some nice ominous clouds as a back drop to this intriguing old building. I attached my Sigma 10-20mm and got as close and as low to the building as I could. Shooting almost directly up and almost on the ground, I snapped off several photos. I then looked at my camera's LCD screen to better see what i'd captured. When I came to this photo, I knew I had one I liked.

Now, of course it wasn't this foreboding in person. But after a little work in Adobe Lightroom 3, doing b&w conversion and quite a bit of burn & dodge, I was able to create what my minds eye saw.

After it was complete I did my normal routine of uploading to Flickr and adding it to a number of groups for viewing. A couple days later I was pleasantly surprised when I was contacted by the group admin Stephan Becker of KERA.org. One of the groups I had submitted the photo to, Art & Seek, is a sub group to the KERA Art & Seek website. They highlight art, music and culture in the Dallas and North Texas area. He notified me that my photo had been selected as Photo of the Week and would be displayed on their site. Oh, exciting! So go have a look. The photo should run on the site until Tuesda, Oct. 2nd.
http://artandseek.net/2010/10/27/flickr-photo-of-the-week-101/