605 - National Portrait Gallery
Today I took architecture photos at the National Portrait Gallery in DC.
It’s almost like the architects wanted to one-up the painters here, because they went hard.
Now it was my job to one-up the architects with photography.
The National Portrait Gallery itself is composed of five different sections, each of which have their own personality. Throughout this photoshoot, I captured three of these five sections- namely because the others were pure art galleries, and didn’t have much to flex in the architectural realm.
We’ll start with the middle section, dubbed the “Kogod Courtroom.” It’s arguably the most famous section of the building, because looking at the ceiling feels like you’re tripping on mushies:
The crazy thing is that depending on the time of day that you’re in the room, it can look completely different because of the different reflections from the sky above.
The hardest part of shooting this room was finding an angle that didn’t feature hordes of tourists. I decided that showcasing the bench was a good way to utilize my wide angle lens, which in turn pushed the people as far away from me as possible.
If you zoom into the far left corner of the bench you can actually peep some people working on their laptops, but I didn’t have the heart to edit them out. And behind them (cut from the frame) there’s easily a couple dozen more people hanging out on their laptops.
Never in my life had I considered going to a museum to get work done. But then again, I edit most of these adventures in the front seat of my car.
The next section of the building was my favorite. Deemed the “The Luce Foundation Center,” this section featured an aerial sculpture that looked like a straight up glitch in the Matrix:
Each gold bar is actually an arm based off of Tommie Smith, the winner of the Men's 200m Sprint in the 1968 Olympic Games. He raised his hand on the podium in an act of protest for black solidarity, and the wave of arms represents a bridge between time and space.
I hope you know I Googled that just for you, because I didn’t learn anything walking around this museum. I was too deep in the photo zone.
Let’s move onto the third section, titled “The Great Hall.” I was impressed with the sheer sense of originality in that name.
It looked straight out of the movie “Clue”:
Ironically, that’s the photo from this sesh that’s doing the best on Unsplash right now, a website where I upload my work for people to use for free. It’s currently sitting at 1.2 million views and 4,600+ downloads.
So yes, I’m going to count that as a one-up. Because there’s no way the architecture or paintings in there got 1.2 million views in the first two weeks they were created. (Namely because the internet wasn’t invented yet.)
But that’s just a simple nuisance.
Godspeed, ya’ll.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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