The Artful Engineer

My wife and I just returned from two and a half weeks in Europe, so for the next month or two I will be featuring photographs from that trip.

Our trip began in York, England, where we had three full days. Well, we would have, except the weather was so hideous the first day that all I have to show for it is 20 images from inside York Minster; I can best describe the weather that day as an aspiring sleetstorm. The next two days were more serviceable, weather-wise, and the stormy skies did add some drama to the views, including a nice rainbow:

York is a great little city and York Minster is an amazing gothic cathedral. I would happily visit there again (which definitely means you should visit a first time if you haven’t). One of the nice things about wandering the narrow streets is that, every so often, you would get a nice glimpse of the cathedral, like this:

The things that make this image for me is the contrast between the sunlit cathedral and the deeply shadowed buildings along the narrow street. The fact that the street is wet is a huge bonus because it adds depth, keeps the foreground from being a formless dark mass, and silhouettes the people. It is wonderful that the streets are made of stone pavers, too, rather than soulless asphalt.

Yorkminster is definitely the tallest building around, so it is often visible above lesser structures. In this next image, I love the way that the tower stands out against the gray clouds and contrasts with the dark brick of the buildings below. The bit of blue sky complements the yellowish tower and helps draw the eye to the that subject. The overlapping shapes of the foreground buildings, each a little brighter than the one in front of it, make a nice dark-to-light progression from the bottom-right corner to the tower itself in the upper-left, too.

York Minster is an impressive structure and, fortunately, there is some space immediately around it. I never did bring my wide angle tilt-shift over to it (which now I regret) so I had to do a lot of perspective-correcting to craft the next image. The immediate focus of interest is the huge round window in the upper right, but there is a lot of other interesting things for the eye to explore in this almost-monochromatic image:

This next image I think borders on humorous, with York Minster taking the role of the overbearing and ostentatious neighbor:

It’s hard to imagine seeing that out your bedroom window every day.