The Broad Museum – Los Angeles, CA

The Broad Museum

Image of the Week

The Broad Museum building in Los Angeles is an art piece on its own. I had initially gone to take photos of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is right down the street. While I was trying to find different angles of the concert hall, I kept noticing The Broad building a block away. It has such interesting architecture, that I just could not resist it any more. I spent nearly two hours before I was done for the night finding different angles to shoot at The Broad.

The Broad Museum building looks and feels different almost every time you take a step. Taking in the street view is totally different than being up close. As I was slowly working my way across, I was virtually captivated by the corners. One of the corners is the main entrance, so seemed rather busy. Signs, street lights, well lit doors.. There was too much there for the image I wanted. The other corner had a similar structure, but without all the distractions.

Image Considerations

Setting up this image had a few challenges to take into consideration. Even though I was shooting at night, the building had plenty of light on it from the street and surrounding buildings. Some of the lights were casting odd shadows that I wanted to avoid. Even though it was nearly 11pm at that point, the street was still fairly busy. Every time a car came by, the headlights changed the lighting a little.

Setting up my tripod turned into one of the more interesting challenges. I wanted to be almost directly under the corner of the building, creating a triangle to fill the frame. The sides of the building were not quite equal, so I had to find a balance for the sides, while finding a pleasing angle looking up at the building corner.

One final challenge happened at the last minute. A group of skateboarders came down the street filming each other. Although I thought they seemed to be very good, I was suddenly concerned about my tripod getting bumped during a shot. My goal was a three shot long exposure bracket for HDR. Tripod movement was not an option.

Image Lighting

Night shooting is not always straight forward, especially with a building. Other buildings and street lights can create odd shadows. Cars passing by, and even the changing colors of street lights can alter the shot. You may not notice how these can impact the shot until you get a larger view like on your computer.

Camera and Settings

I shot this with my Canon 1Ds Mk III and Canon 28-135mm IS USM, mounted on a ProMaster tripod. I used a ten second shutter delay. Fortunately, at ISO 100 the longest exposure of the three frames would not exceed 30 seconds. The aperture also played a role in how I thought about the image. With pointing up at the building, I needed a good amount of depth of field to be sure the entire corner would be in focus.

I shot more than a few brackets were taken as street conditions created lighting changes. The biggest problem with the lighting during exposure was cars driving down the street. The total exposure time for the three frames was approximately 50 seconds.

  • 33mm
  • f/18
  • HDR three shot bracket at +/- 2.0
  • ISO 100

Editing Inspiration

My goal with the editing was to see if I could do justice to this style of image. I have seen this type of shot with a black background, and always enjoyed them. Although it was a night shot, the sky was not as black as I had wanted. With that, I selected the sky and filled with black. This ended up creating a color balance problem with the lower triangle as part of the building corner. It was dark, but suddenly the wrong color and had building details. One more selection and fill with black did the trick.

Balancing the colors, shadows, and feel with the HDR were key aspects of the look I wanted for this. After finding the right balance, I adjusted the color toning for the black and white processing.

The final subtle adjustment was in the clarity for the amount of details. The Broad Museum has a slightly rough surface, that had too many details showing in the image. Reducing the clarity solved that issue, and made for an interesting look in the end.