Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Visiting the Spokane Skeleton Man

Market Street Station

This evening shoot began, over in the Hillyard area. The target for the evening was the new building location on the Northwest corner of Queen and Market. It appeared to not be occupied other than some lower level office windows. The architecture of this building did have some unique quality, so I cropped out the majority of the building (which was dark), and centered on the main front entrance. This first series of shots was at a building called, Market Street Station.

http://www.spokanenightscenes.com/allstate.htm

The next stop for photos on this evening was a little unusual for the “typical shots,” that I normally look for. Photographer Josh Burdick was with me for the evening shoot, and he mentioned a sculpture at the base of the Monroe Street Hill. It was a metal sculpture in front of an antique store, so we headed out of the Hillyard area to visit this sculpture.

The Skeleton

We found this sculpture, which was basically a skeleton riding a dinosaur of some kind. It was in darkness, but lighted from the west by ambient street lighting. With the use of remote flash, and an amber filter on my Big Max flashlight, I was able to get shadows into the skull, and some shaded lighting onto the exterior of the skeleton (and dino). To get a tight shot of the skeleton, I had to crop out most of the dino, and all of the right hand. I erased the farthest extension of the right forearm, and copied the left hand of the skeleton. I inverted the left hand, and moved it onto the right forearm, so that now my skeleton man had two visible hands. I removed some junk from the background, and decided to remove the source of the junk which was the side of a building. Now, the skeleton man was able to really stand out without all of the nonsense that was going on behind him. Not sure what this guy is really called, but I’ll stop by the store and get some additional information on skeleton man.

http://www.spokanenightscenes.com/skeletonman.htm

The Flying Goat

Next location was a target over on Northwest Boulevard. This place was packed with people watching the ill fated Gonzaga basketball team play San Francisco that evening. My original intent was to shoot the very colorful sign in front of the building, but a fog bank moved in as Josh and I arrived at this place. What I decided to ultimately do, post photo shoot, was desaturate the entire thing. Might as well let the fog do its thing, as the moisture droplets just hung in the air in front of the camera. I cropped out the majority of the shot series, so that there were basically some areas lit by ambient lighting and the overhead business sign. So, here is a place called The Flying Goat.

http://www.spokanenightscenes.com/graygoat.htm

JDM