YANS (Yet another night shoot)

I was downtown this week with two friends of mine looking for Christmas lights. Since sunset is so early this time of year, by the time we met at 5:30, it was effectively dark. We were wanting to get in some time at dusk to photograph, but it didn't happen.

We didn't see a whole lot of lights, but I had adventures anyway. One of the security guards at the Gerald R Ford Presidential Museum came up and asked me what I was doing and whether I was a professional. We kind of wanted to go inside the Public Museum also, but they don't allow tripods inside unless you make an appointment. Lastly I got kicked off what looked like a public plaza by a security guard at the Fifth Third building on Monroe. It just wasn't my night to please security guards I guess.

While I didn't get a whole lot of Christmas lights photos, we did spend some time at Calder Plaza photographing "La Grand Vitesse", the iconic Calder sculpture that has come to symbolize Grand Rapids. I've never spent a whole lot of time photographing the sculpture, and never any at night. It's hard to come up with a view of the sculpture that hasn't been published before, hopefully I was able too. I switched to a wider angle lens and went for photos of a subset of the sculpture like the one above, or to photos showing the sculpture sitting alone in an empty plaza. I'll come back to them in a bit and see it I still think they show a different view.