Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com


A   S C R A P B O O K   O F   S O L U T I O N S   F O R   T H E   P H O T O G R A P H E R

Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.

Friday Slide Show: Skyscrapers Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

12 July 2019

Last week we searched our image collection for images of skyscrapers using Excire Search Pro only to be distracted by the Transamerica Pyramid photobombing its way into the mix. We yielded to temptation and featured the pointy-headed landmark.

Not this week. This week we have returned to the skyscrapers with renewed discipline, fending off temptation to bring you a set of images of very tall buildings.

As we do, though, we have to wonder if their days are numbered.

We're still building them in San Francisco, admittedly. The Salesforce Tower, however, argues both ways. Someone will always want to build a taller building. But how will you fill it?

The remote economy makes a lot of sense for everyone. Just ask the hoards stymied by Muni's single-track subway system every day.

On the other hand, people like to mingle. Because, no, we don't really work all day. We mingle and work, work and mingle. We're not machines, after all.

We constrained our usual enthusiasm for the Upright tool in Lightroom because when you're looking this far up, verticals ought to converge.

Mingling seems to be winning out. The citywide office vacancy rate was 5.5 percent in June, down from 7.4 percent a year ago.

But do you really have to shoot up 70 floors in earthquake country to mingle?

Time will tell.

It is always reshaping the city's skyline and we don't expect it will ever quite be satisfied.

You can see the transition from brick to stone to glass in some of these images as the buildings grow taller and taller, year by year.

You can't tell the 3-megapixel digicam image from the dSLR image, though.

The earliest image (and first in the chronologically-arranged slide show) was taken by a Nikon 990 in 2002. The last by an Olympus E-PL1 in 2018. But a variety of cameras were used, including the Canon Rebel XTi, Nikon D200 and D300 and an assortment of digicams.

The locations are not all in San Francisco. We'll leave it to the attentive observer to find at least one outlier.

We constrained our usual enthusiasm for the Upright tool in Lightroom because when you're looking this far up, verticals ought to converge. When we did use it, we used it mildly, often settling for what Auto provided.

It didn't hurt to straighten many of the images, though, making whatever was in the middle of the canvas perpendicular. It's not safe to get dizzy in a swivel chair.

We were amused to discover that not all of these images are vertical. Sometimes a scan of the horizon shows a variety in building surfaces and techniques that is nearly riotous.

Almost makes us feel like mingling again.


BackBack to Photo Corners