It still doesn’t seem to have taken off in Melbourne…. plenty of apartment buildings, new office buildings and shops, but barely a person to be seen.

Anyway, I found a couple of buildings I liked with an interesting facades, so walked around them looking for some interesting angles to capture.

In keeping with the dark moody day its been today I’ve processed these as black and white, added some noise and punched in a bit of contrast.

After we returned from holiday I decided that the other project that I had in mind wasn’t going to come together in time so would need to be shelved in favor of this.

The first step was to scout some locations via Google maps. I’d decided that at first it would be easiest to use car park buildings with rooftop access. On top of this I’ve been lucky enough to work in one of the many towers in the CBD and was able to gain access to the 32nd floor rooftop.

Now that I had my targets in mind the next step was to actually get out and shoot.

I’ve been quite pleased with the results in the short time I’ve been shooting, and am quite sure that this will be something that I will slowly continue shooting as time goes on.

I’ve also update the main portfolio on this site to include these images so check out michaelvalli.com/urbanrooftops

M.L.C

Another image this morning from my home city of Wellington. I really enjoy this old M.L.C Building, with it’s distinctive colour and architecture, it has to be one of the stand outs for me in the Wellington CBD.

It’s interesting that with this framing it seems as though all the surrounding buildings are drawn to this one. To me it feels quite claustrophobic and cramped. I also enjoyed how the two complementary colours work in the frame and are quite pronounced by the lack of other strong colours.

Untitled #8

Checkered

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone out for a walk around the city and done some shooting… part laziness…. part busy with other thing…. Anyway I got out for a long walk after work yesterday. I ended up strolling from our place to the city and wandered around there for a good hour. Then met up with the girls for a dinner at one of our favourite restaurants, Wabi Sabi Salon.

I set out last with the camera on monochrome with the intention of trying to capture some moody end of day light images. I noticed that this small passageway was empty, so strolled down framed up and captured this. Not a lot of post processing has been done… slight crop, split tone (yellow/blue).

Flinders Street Station

I’ve been working my way through my LR catalogue trying to clean it up a bit and noticed this image that I took just before xmas. I assumed being a photographer in Melbourne I’d have posted an image of this spot already… but no. Not a single one.

So here’s my take on a already widely photographed subject in the Melbourne landscape. I’ve gone low and close and worked the processing to give the image an older feel to represent the buildings age.