Prospect 2… Through An Art House Back Door

“Your work is going to be in Prospect 2!”, Bob Tannen exclaimed on the phone, only half-jokingly.  Now, I don’t expect you, kind reader, to have followed the marginal trajectory of my outsider status in the local art world.  I have never tried very hard to get exhibits, flatter patrons, press the flesh, sip the warm Chablis, or otherwise enhance the local art scene with my presence.   I do wish it the best.  And I wish Art was more of a meritocracy.  But wanting artistic acclaim to be based on merit is like wanting success in romance to be based on I.Q. scores.  A handful of local artists, however,  have always caught my attention and earned my respect since I moved here in 1982.  I was staff photographer at the Contemporary Arts Center from ’82 to ’85 so I got to see a LOT of local art… and get a semi-inside look at art-world machinations, which also fed my growing disillusionment with art “scenes, but Bob Tannen‘s child-like fascination with implausible, outrageous ideas has always interested me.  One of his ideas (I think it was for the ’84 World’s Fair) was a fifty-foot tall Barq’s root beer bottle.   His front yard is scattered with kid-sized galvanized sheet-metal shotgun houses.   A golden, mounted sailfish flies from a live oak tree.   He has made plastic water bottles do things you couldn’t imagine.  So when he called me to execute his latest concept for his Prospect2 Art House I couldn’t resist.

“I wanted to turn the top of the World Trade Mart into a giant green traffic light but the building’s owners wouldn’t let me,” he explained,  “so I’m going to let you do it.”  Tannen, now retired, earned his living as an urban planner, and got a bird’s eye view of New Orleans development…or perhaps a “worm’s eye view” depending on your perspective.  And then there’s this reality: the Trade Mart building is seen as a huge liability by some in “degovernment” (that’s my invented term for developers/government) who would like to see it demolished.  Personally, I have no opinion on the matter one way or the other, though I do think its a pretty cool example of mid-century New Orleans mod.  I had to laugh when chunks of the building recently “fell off” in a “heavily touristed area”, as reported by the news media.  What a co-inky-dink!  Glad no one was hurt!  But I digress..

So Tannen explains the idea to me and suggests shooting at night.  Or maybe sunset.  Knowing that the sun rises and tracks BEHIND the WTM building means that the glow of the invented green lights will be battling with the brightness of the sky/background, and I would want the green lights to stand out as much as possible.   This means setting my alarm clock and going out before sunrise.  Tannen was quite specific about the Canal Street vantage point he wanted.  I made a number of tripod exposures of the “straight” scene, varying shutter speeds to change the tracking of the car headlights.

Focal length was telephoto at around 200mm to flatten out the perspective and produce a nice graphic rendering of the architecture.  Shutter release was mandatory given the telephoto/shutter-speed combination and tripod-mounting.  New Orleans downtown in the wee hours of the morning can be very pleasant and quiet, though I will confess to periodically looking over my shoulder for a stray opportunist.  We may not use the head-covering view camera hoods anymore but that doesn’t make a concentrating photographer any less vulnerable  to one who would decide to take advantage in the urban jungle.

So once I was satisfied with the Canal Street shots I went back to my truck and drove one block onto the Canal Street Ferry.  The ferry at this hour, and going from east to west bank, is really wonderful.   No crowds, no noise.  Just a smooth glide across the Mississippi to Algiers and back.  I shot both going and coming, still using the 70-200mm racked out, but hand-held this time as the sun was just beginning to rise.  The best shots, in terms of light balance, were just after sunrise.  The sun was direct enough to give dimension to the building but still soft enough to mitigate contrast extremes.   The hint of warm color also helped and produced a look that was so very different from the night-sky Canal Street shots.  I had a nice conversation with a Japanese gentleman crossing the river on his way to work while I shot.  He was a serious photo enthusiast who had never seen the enormous size of the Canon MKII camera bodies up close.  The camera is a near-indestructible workhorse but I don’t know how many more years my lower-lumbar can stand lugging it around…

So now I had a card full of good renderings of the building and it was time to make the Photoshop magic happen back at my studio.  I brought the images into Lightroom, my customary workflow, and made any general global corrections, including noise reduction, that needed to happen.   Next I posted a web gallery of the selects from which Tannen made his two “hero” selections.  “What shade of green do you want in the top floor?” was my first question.   “Make it look like a traffic light”, Tannen replied…

But before I could make the fake penthouse disco I had to go in and “lasso” (Photoshop’s tool/term for selecting a specific area) the area(s) in question.  You may notice that if you select several different areas in an image that, as soon as you have made the first selection and click on to the next, you will LOSE the first selection.  To keep the first and keep adding areas to it you must create a new “channel” and keep adding selected areas to that channel.  And you can force the lasso tool to make straight lines by holding down the Option key (Mac) as you move the mouse, which was essential on an area like the window panes.

Once I had the windows on their own channel it was a simple matter of “loading” that channel and watching it appear as a selection that included ALL of the window panes.   Each selected window area also needed to be on its own layer in the Photoshop file.  Now I could “fill” that selection with an actual shade of green sampled from a traffic light in one of the early pre-sunrise exposures.  A slide of the “opacity” on that layer would allow a bit of the interior to show through the green if necessary.  So that was a very cool look but what it lacked was the foggy glow that would make it look like real lights were up there pumping photons out into the universe of downtown New Orleans.  This required a duplicate “window” channel.  But this channel had to be blurred and expanded.  So the end result required two overlaid green-light-window channels, a soft glowing blurry one on top of a sharp-edged one, both with less than 100% opacity.  The glow effect is very subtle in the river-view sunlit shot, as it would be in real life as the sunlight began to overpower the artificial light.  Conversely, in the Canal Street view pre-sunrise I made the glow more prominent, as it would appear at that time of day/night.  The believability, or veracity, of Photoshop manipulations usually hinge on this last one-percent of tweaking that layer opacity and other effects provide.   The trick is to know when it works and when its not quite there yet.  Of course, it also helps to know how to get “there”.

Tannen further art directed the river view image.  He asked me to add the green glow to the lower level of louvered frames just below the actual windows.  “But those aren’t windows, Bob,” I protested, “they’re louvers for air conditioning vents or something.”  It mattered not to him.  “Fill them in,” he commanded.  Fortunately (for both of us) I enjoy having others make the artistic decisions and then just hiring me to carry them out.  The lower level fill-in was a simple matter of making more selections to another channel, then saving to a layer,  just like the upper area.  I also felt that the green light wasn’t quite bright enough in the first pass, so I made a Curves adjustment to the combined windows layers.

I actually retouched the darker Canal Street view first, to get me warmed up for the higher demands of working on the river view image.  It was important that we use an exposure of the darker scene with a proper tonal balance.  Some detail needed to be visible in the facades of the building but not so much as to distract the viewer from the upper floor lights.  I also had to keep in mind that the final pieces for display were going to be printed on a large-format banner printer, the kind used for outdoor signs you see at grand openings and things like that.  Given the limitation of banner printing I decided to brighten up the overall image just a bit to account for “dot gain”, an effect that darkens printed images due to microscopic spreading of ink droplets.  I think the printed piece still looks a bit dark, but you must choose your battles (as they say), and this isn’t one I’ll fight over.

The Canal Street (night) view was more dramatic overall because of the contrast between the green glow and the dark setting but the River view is kind of compelling in a different way, I think, just because its so unlikely that you would ever see such a thing.  I almost expect the top of the building to start spinning and whirr off into space like a scene from Star Wars every time I look at it.  And if there is a “genius” to the work of artist Robert Tannen, this is it.  His work elegantly walks the tightrope between fantasy and plausibility, between possible and downright unbelievable.  He understands that good art requires good ideas and, fortunately for us, his ideas don’t exist in some highly subjective art stratosphere but down here in the dirt and concrete of the “real” world, where he can hire a lug like me to make them visible.  I think the world is a better place for it.  I KNOW the art world is better for it.