Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California. I’m pretty taken with the rotunda of the entrance pavilion of the Getty Center. There’s something about the lines, the light, and the shapes. Can’t help myself.

New York City. This image is from a trip to New York I made with my friend Gary over the Holidays.

If memory serves, Madison Square Garden is a block to my right. Gary and I spent a good twenty minutes photographing the flags in front of this building. The wind was just right to blow them into fascinating shapes.

I love these reflections where you can see a clear reflected background but also hints of a life inside the glass. It would be perfect if someone were standing at one of the windows.

Almost every town in New England has one of these traditional Congregational churches and while they look great in daylight they also look great lit up at night. The coldness of New England winter and the traditional white exterior offset the warmth of candle-lit windows.

I’m not a Christian nor do I belong to this church but churches like this one are like wormholes back through American history and as such, I’m both fascinated by them and feel moved when I’m inside them.

It’s been a tradition in our family to go to the late Christmas Eve service at this church to both sing and hear Reverend Cheryl Anderson deliver a "Christmas meditation" (better known as a sermon). If this church is a wormhole back through American history Cheryl acts as a tour guide or facilitator helping those of us who come on Christmas eve to understand the Christmas story in a larger context and connect it to everyday ideas. I almost always come away from her sermons thinking which is just what she wants. She’s quite an amazing person and my entire family hasn’t missed one of her Christmas eve sermons in over ten years.

My flickr contact Michael Greenwood did a great job framing this historic staircase.

Two female staff look bored as they gaze over the grand white marble stairway entrance to the Museo de la Revolución in Havana.

Those steps look pretty now but in 1957 they were flowing with the blood of students who died trying to storm the palace and oust then President Fulgencio Batista – you can still see the bullet holes even though someone has tried to fill them in.

New York City. A quick shot looking up into the fog before we went inside Grand Central and boarded the train home. Fog is beautiful and had I had more time in the city I think I could have made some nice images of these big buildings with their lights in fog. I’ll call this image a placemarker for a future trip.

Watch the movie trailer.

[via Coudal Partners Blended Feed]

This is a nice collection of images of the World Trade Center prior to 9-11.

David Darling setting up for a concert in Battery Park, July 19, 2001. Original post here.

In this case, the 24mm end of the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L causes distortion in the perspective on buildings left and right of center.

Before:

After:

The image would need to be cropped to remove the black areas left and right of bottom center.

I heard about this application from one of my favorite photobloggers, Sam Javanrouh who no doubt uses it a lot on his wide angle urban landscape images.

New York City. Before we boarded a subway to Brooklyn Gary and I sat down to eat lunch on the steps of this rather large investment bank. These are the greedy bastards that built insanely risky investments from collections of sub-prime mortgages cooked up by the likes of Countrywide Realty (California) and others.

The sad truth is, even while being bailed out they continue to build risky investments to make short term profits which all of us have become addicted to. Makes me feel old and conservative or young and libertarian or some combination of both.