Selfridges Building

Hi all ... I have just spent the weekend in Birmingham (the English one, not the Alabama one!)

One of the most notable buildings is the Selfridges department store which has an ultra-modern "skin" over the entire exterior. It's all curves and these strange disks and lends itself to abstract photography. What do you think? All straight photographs, except for a mono conversion.

Cheers
Mike

Those are very cool Mike! This looks like a very fun building to shoot. I love the compositions of the first and 3rd shots.

Mike,

I like the first and third. I like that the first has more contours, but the third leads the eye better. Both are nice. Well spotted and shot.

PC

Great subjec, well shot. If you hadn't told me what it was I would never know.
Light, contrast, etc. are all perfect to me. I like all three.
What color was it before conversion?

frog - here's an original ... as you can see, converting to mono doesn't really change a lot!

Cheers
Mike

It changes enough to make it better.
About what I expected thy color would be.

I'm enjoying the first one best of the three Mike. They do play with the eyes a bit before they settle down.

All great shots, Mike. Well composed. I also think one is the strongest with two right next to it. the second one is also very good, just not quite as good as the other two.
Really well done

An interesting exercise in composition.

I seem to be the contrarian here and like your second image the best. I like that in includes some sky although there is nothing in any of these images to give scale and I like that too.

Nice job with the B&W.

if you wouldn't had told us what it was I would have said these were computer generated. Very cool and very well done.

I'd like to see the second one in colour.
I know the building is pretty much monochrome, but you have such a grey sky I think it needs colour - or some serious editing to put some contrast back in that sky.

Thanks guys - I agree with most of you (sorry, MB1 ! :D ) that the purely abstract ones without sky are best - however, the sky was a little washed out. I might fiddle with replacing the sky with a dramatic one and see how it works.

It hadn't occurred to me that the absence of any scale indicators was what made them work (thanks for that, MB1 !)

It is POSSIBLE that I might be moving to that neck of the woods later in the year, in which case I will have lots of opportunities to revisit it.

Cheers
Mike

Nice work Mike, I agree that the B&W works well. The composition is splendid as always..

B&W works very well in this case and the first one is particularly impressive, great stuff!

All I can say is funky! (and that's in a good way. #2 and #1 are the ones that really catch my eye.

I've really never thought much about converting pictures to B&W except in a few rare circumstances. I think this is an excellent prime example for me to explore this more. Thanks for the post!

Hypnotic and soothing...reminds me of "A Clockwork Orange" set.

Congrats on featured photo Mike. Well deserved.

Mike - I think you got about as good shots as possible here. They're well lit, have good DOF, and are shot from attractive angles wrt the way the patterns are progressing, etc. There are a few imperfections on the disks themselves that you might PS out, and I also wonder what these would look like with a warm, sunset glow? Oops! forgot, It's England --- what sun? :)

G

Thanks guys! I'm chuffed :D

Mike

Congrats Mike.......

Very good and sharp... way to go! :thumbsup:

Greg and Javier - thank you. It's much appreciated :p

Mike

Didache (Mike)
Congratulations on your Featured Photo.
Very nice piece of art indeed!
Robert