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Friday Slide Show: Rodin Share This on LinkedIn   Share This on Google   Tweet This   Forward This

16 May 2014

We arrived a little early for our visit to the Cantor Arts Center to see the Watkins exhibit so we wandered around the Rodin sculpture garden.

Gates of Hell. A rare installation of Auguste Rodin's unfinished masterpiece.

We had a Nikon D300 with us and it had a 35mm f2.8 Nikkor on it with a polarizer. A polarizer is not a bad idea when you're shooting shiny bronze sculpture. And the 35mm lens on a DX Nikon presents a normal angle of view.

The Cantor has about 20 of Rodin's works in the garden, including The Gates of Hell. There's quite a few more inside (totaling 170 all together), including The Thinker. That makes it among the largest collections of Rodin's work outside Paris. And The Burghers of Calais greet you as you enter the Quad.

They're fun to shoot because they're dramatic figures. But they're challenging too because they're dark subjects, which your internal meter will insist on overexposing.

There's also an interesting Rodin exhibit inside the Cantor through Aug. 3 called Inside Rodin's Hands: Art, Technology and Surgery. It explores Rodin's depiction of hands in relation to medical conditions like Dupuytrens syndrome and Apert syndrome.

Composing the images, we were bothered now and then by some nearby construction. So this slide show, which is mainly detail shots, is just a taste of what you can do there. We've shot there many times over the years and we'll be back. We're the guy wearing the Cal cap.

Funny story today, by the way, about a household sculpture that turned out to be an original Rodin.

Oddly enough Lightroom wanted to increase our exposures quite a bit. We tamped that down under a stop and bumped up the Highlight slider just a bit, but not much. By far the biggest adjustment we made was to the Shadow slider, which let us open up the shadows significantly. Clarity helped sharpen up what that 1970s Nikkor could see, too.

We did a little cropping (as you'll see) and used the upright tool to fix some perspective issues on one of The Gates of Hell images.

Our captions are merely suggestive. There's a great deal more to learn about the sculptures but the way in, we think, is by looking at them.

We're not sure which was more fun -- shooting the images or editing them. But we have certainly enjoyed looking at them -- and hope you do, too.


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