Yale Center for British Art
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
Since it looks like a little bit of winter has arrived in this neck of the woods I decided I head down to Yale University in New Haven and visit the Yale Center for British Art. I know New Haven somewhat and it was easy to get there and find metered parking about a block away. The outside of the building is not impressive to me. However the inside was totally different story. The paintings they had were amazing. It is the largest and most complete collection of British Art outside of the United Kingdom. It is well presented and I pretty much had the place to myself. A lot of the paintings were portraits and some were really old (like the 1400’s). It certainly was an interesting slice of historical British life. Many of the paintings seemed close to life size and I found the amount of large canvases to be simply astounding. I brought both of my cameras and they even encouraged me to take pictures, no flash, though. Since it was dimly lit they came out a little under exposed. I was primarily trying to work on composition and I purposely didn’t want to take a lot of photos. I was fairly happy with some of the results: it is something to build on, anyways. If I had a tripod I would have done much better. I never bring one on the first time to a place like this. It just changes the whole dynamic of everything. I didn’t look at the Sculpture Collection but apparently that is big collection, also.
Across the street was the Yale University Art Gallery. Again a very good collection well presented. I didn’t like the modern stuff but they had wonderful African, Asian and European collections. I briefly looked around (about an hour) and was again gravitated to the older pieces of art, (good selections from the 1300-1400 and 1500’s). Thank you for viewing my attempts at some art photography. The only way to get better is to go out there shooting. For me I have to try and break the rut (it is a wonderful rut, though) of just shooting botanical images. That is kind of safe ground for me and I have more information, experience and skills. I am going to upload a few additional images to the Misc. Pictures page at Digital Flower Pictures.com. You can use the link in my profile and go to the Misc. Pictures album if you are interested.
John Gubbins-Newton and his Sister, Mary Newton
Oil in Canvas ca. 1830
Paul Mellon Collection
Yale University
3 comments:
Please do add art photos. I tried to take photos of some exceptional pre-columbian figurines once but they were behind glass and the lighting was poor so the photos either had a ghastly yellow cast even with a digital camera or the reflections were terrible or it was out of focus. Handholding the camera didn't help matters. You did a great job getting the painting of the Newtons square on. Getting the camera in exactly the middle of the painting is a problem sometimes.
LOL. I had plenty of shots like that. I just didn't post them. I was surprised the Coolpix 8400 did better than the D70s.
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