The George Peabody Library (of the Peabody Institute, which includes one of the nation's foremost music conservatories, and which is part of Johns Hopkins University) is widely regarded as one the most beautiful libraries in the United States.
I'd long wanted to photograph the place, and managed to get over there yesterday afternoon and spent some time taking pictures.
One the minus side, access to the stacks is restricted, so I couldn't get the vantage point I'd been hoping for. (I could almost certainly have gone up the "Staff Only" stairs, and photographed away, without anyone noticing for some minutes. But I decided I'd act responsibly and obey the rules. I'm sorry if that costs me photographic street cred with some people.)
On the plus side, while I'd previously been told that tripods were forbidden, when I asked the librarian upon my arrival, he told me that a tripod would be okay. Moral of this story? Always seek out that second opinion. Other moral of this story? Always keep a tripod in your car, just in case. (I always have my old Bogen 3001, in the trunk.)
And a tripod was definitely handy. Not just because it permitted more careful composition than would've been possible handheld, but because I was looking at shutter speeds of around 1 second @ f/8 @ ISO 100. And my K10D's in-body image stabilization is good, but 1 second is still an unacceptably long time for handheld exposures.
Yeah, I could've bumped the ISO up to 800, and opened the lens (the 18-55mm kit lens) up to f/3.5, but that still would've had me shooting at around 1/30 sec., and I'd rather shoot at ISO 100 than at ISO 800, at f/8 than at f/3.5 (in this instance), and on a tripod at 1 second rather than handheld at 1/30 second.
The lighting was also very tricky. There were some areas well illuminated primarily by sunlight, and other areas relatively poorly illuminated and relying on incandescent bulbs. Big range of brightnesses there, even on a cloudy/rainy day like yesterday. And, of course, the temperature of sunlight is very different from the color temperature of the bulbs, so balancing those two took a little doing, too.
I'm going to work on the picture more in Photoshop, but isn't that always the case?
This picture is a pano, consisting of 8 individual images (taken in vertical orientation, and at 18mm) stitched together. Had to go the pano route, as 18mm wasn't anywhere near wide enough to get the image I had in mind. The picture loses a lot being resized and saved as a compressed jpg, but there's no way I'm going to post a 200MB 8000x4000 tif file, you know?
Anyway, the library is really gorgeous; this picture doesn't begin to do it justice. If you have any interest in architecture at all, and you happen to find yourself in Baltimore, it's definitely worth a visit. (If you're not much interested in architecture, but you like taking pictures, Peabody is right in Mt. Vernon, which is an extremely "photo rich" environment. So run in and take a look as long as you're there.)
--
Michael