From my family to yours, we hope you have a wonderful holiday season and happy new year.
At this time of year, I always go back to photos I took of this church many years ago with Brad and Dave. I like them because they are rich, and they scream winter holidays. But it’s also because I haven’t taken many holiday photos over the years.
With the holidays, spending time with family, etc….I may not be on my routine schedule for the blog over the next 10 days or so. With that in mind, I have a small holiday message for you…...
From my family to yours, we hope you have a great holiday season and get to spend time with your family and friends. As the year comes to an end, I can truly say I’ve had a busy, productive, exciting and fun year. We’ve traveled a ton, spent time with loved ones, and experienced life. I hope you had a great year as well and have a great 2014.
Thanks for visiting my blog. Cheers to you.
To purchase a print or view the entire gallery, click the photo above.
I hope everyone is having a great Christmas, holiday, or whatever you celebrate. MJ and I gave each other a long weekend away. We skipped town and went to Miami. While we were there we went to South Beach, Bal Harbor, Bayside, a Monastery Cloister built in the year 1133 and I went scuba diving. We have to be the only people who visit a Monastery while on vacation. I’ll have some pictures from the Miami trip for you soon. For now, I have a holiday (Christmas) tree picture for you.
This is the Christmas tree in the middle of the ice skating rink at PPG Plaza in downtown Pittsburgh. I took this in early December, while on a photo walk with Dave and Brad Truxell. This is a 5 bracket set (+2, +1, 0, -1, -2), processed with Photomatix Pro and edited in Photoshop CS6.
There are a few other photos from that evening in the Gallery - Pittsburgh Area folder: http://brook-ward.com/pitt-test/
PPG Plaza
MJ and I have been in Pennsylvania for over two years now and I drive by an abandoned industrial property from time to time near our home. I am told it is an old box factory that was operated by a glass company. Back in the day, along with steel companies there were a large number of glass companies that operated around Washington PA making many different products. Today both the glass and steel companies are gone. Most of the old properties have been renovated for other uses or were destroyed to build something else. But this one large complex remains and I’ve talked about photographing on numerous occasions.
Well a few weeks ago, MJ and I went on a scouting mission to take a look at the property. While there we found lots of graffiti, but one individual’s work caught our eye and I went back to capture it for you. When we returned to photograph the graffiti, we scared off a few guys who appeared to be salvaging metal for recycling. When we pulled in, they left the site fairly quickly and gave us a good look over.
I hope this photo brings joy to your holiday season regardless to how and what you celebrate.
This photo was taken with a Nikon D800, 14-24mm f2.8 lens, aperture mode, with bracketing (+1, 0, -1) and a tripod. I processed the bracketed images using Photomatrix Pro and edited in Photoshop CS6
Happy Holidays.
Santa, Reindeer, & Snowman Graffiti on abandoned factory building
During my photo walk last Wednesday night; we came upon Santa’s House at Market Square in downtown Pittsburgh. As you can see, there was no line waiting to sit on Santa’s lap. You can also drop off your letter to Santa in the mailbox to the left of the house. This is setup in the middle of Market Square, which is little festival area where they hold different events just about every week with little shops and restaurants surrounding this square. The Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG) Plaza is next to it and partly attached.
TONIGHT:
MJ and I are going to Community Action Southwest’s Olde Fashioned Christmas fund raising event. I am on the Board of Directors of this wonderful non-profit organization that runs a number of programs, which all strive to eleminate poverty in our community. I donated one of my framed pictures for them to auction off tonight. I hope the organization raises a bunch of money, all of which goes direct to their great programs. If you would like to donate directly and can’t attend tonight, you can do so at:
PPG Place
In front of the PPG (Pittsburgh Plate Glass) corporate headquarters, they have an ice skating rink with this large Christmas tree in the middle. In the summer time, there is a water fountain in this spot for kids to play in the water. This time of year, people can ice skate. It is a very pretty location and fun environment. I took this picture last night while on a photo walk with Brad and Dave Truxell. It was a very cold evening, but we have a good time walking around downtown Pittsburgh capturing holiday moments.
