Last weekend I was in Kansas City for a conference. I was busy enough that I did not have much time for photographing. I did several photographs from my room on the 35th floor of the hotel, several on a clear night, several on a night with lightning flickering in the distance as a storm rolled through. And I made a bunch walking home from dinner around sunset one evening. Here are a few of my favorites.
The first two are from my hotel room at night. One is from that clear night with a dark sky, using my 18mm lens. It was a 17 second exposure, a JPG out of the camera, with minor editing in LR. I used a Kodak Portra film recipe from the Fuji X Weekly site. The second is an 18 second exposure with my 27mm lens, a RAW file developed in LR, taken during the storm. The cumulative effect of the lightning was to make the sky bright and a warm yellow. In both cases, I simply set my camera on the window ledge, shooting through the glass of the window.
The next four are from a walk back to my hotel from Brewer’s Alley. As with the first nightscape above, I used the Kodak Portra recipe with a few minor tweaks. I’ve come to love this film look for urban scenes. For all of these, one of the minor tweaks was to mask the sky in LR, lower the exposure a touch, and add a bit of color saturation. When I upped to exposure and shadows a little to get the darker areas of the photos right, I needed to correct the brights in what had become a washed-out sky.
I love the colors in all four of these. Of them, my favorite is the one with the parking lot and little restaurant (“Novel”) in the foreground and downtown KC in the background.
Finally, one day-time image, taken early-evening, walking to a restaurant for dinner. This one is an iPhone image, not one using my trusty Fujifilm X-T5. Processed in my iPhone, using the native Photos app.
I’d not been to Kansas City before. From the little bit I saw of it, I liked it. Good BBQ. Large portions of food. A nice variety of restaurants and a good micro-brewery scene. It’s a bigger city than Grand Rapids, but it had a similar Midwestern industrial city feel to it.
Enjoy!
No Ordinary Light 