Stairway to the stars

This picture started as a photograph of the stairway at the newly-renovated Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. It's one of the rare art museums in DC where you have to pay admission, but it's well worth the entry fee.

The original picture had an interesting pattern, but it was still a little dull. So I converted the image into Postscript form, then moved it into Adobe Illustrator where I converted it into this interesting collection of stars. The image in the gallery is a slightly cropped version, done to accommodate the 17 inch paper width.

The trip from its original form to this final version is what gives this image its title.

Print Size: 17 x 38 inches

Print Price:  $290

Broken Shell

Some have questioned why the shells I photograph are broken or imperfect, and some have commented that they have better shells. Perfect shells are easy to find. There are hundreds of shops that sell them, and they aren't very expensive to acquire.

Why the broken shells? I believe that shells are like people. The imperfections add character. Where there is a hole in the shell, you can look into its interior and see another universe. You can see where the creature that inhabited the shell actually lived. And you can see what happened to the shell after its owner abandoned it. (Many of those beautiful shells that you see in the stores had living creatures in them when they were "harvested" to sell to the tourists.)

Print Size: 17 x 23 inches

Print Price:  $180

Tree panorama with glowing buds

This is a vertical panorama of some of the trees in the forest that surrounds the Nassau County Museum of Art. The museum always has something worth seeing and great to stroll the two hundred-plus beautifully-landscaped acres.

This picture was shot in infrared and then some of the color was restored. The infrared rendering makes the buds on the trees glow like little lightbulbs.

Print Size: 17 x 43 inches

Print Price:  $330

Tony's Angels - #2

This is the original angel from atop the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. He's retired now, banished to one of the lower courtyards. But in him, I saw an heroic spirit.

I added some color to the statue to make it look like it's lit with a hot light source. Darken the sky up towards the upper right-hand corner to focus the attention on the center of the picture. Turn the sky at the bottom of the picture yellow-orange to give it a fire-and-brimstone look. Then crop off a bit of the top to tighten things up a little.

And now the angel comes alive, no longer a statue. Now he's standing on the border

Print Size: 17 x 23 inches

Print Price:  $180

In the Stroll Garden #1

This scene evokes the beauty of the John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden in Locust Valley, NY. As you walk along the pathways, you see how man can interact with nature to produce glorious views like this one.

This is a vertical panorama. I rendered it in this sepia-like color because sometimes a photograph in full color can show too much. This is an Impressionistic rendering of the scene.

Print Size: 17 x 43 inches

Print Price:  $330