Last month I led a weekend workshop in Boston with Michael Muraz. Prior to the weekend of shooting we met up with everyone online for a presentation and tips on how to best approach architectural abstracts and cityscapes. This way everyone was prepared for a full weekend of shooting.
I haven’t been to Boston in over 15 years, and well before I was focusing on architecture photography, so spending 3 days photographing all over the city was great. We had perfect weather and managed to see a lot.
We arrived a day before the actual workshop began to scout and photograph the JFK Presidential Library I mentioned in this previous post. On Saturday we all met up and headed to the Museum of Fine Arts for our first stop. While I didn’t get anything I really liked from the older part of the museum, I did manage one shot of the new addition designed by Foster + Partners:

Also, outside the museum is a bronze sculpture, I couldn’t find who designed it but we had fun creating abstracts of its geometric shape.

Next up was the Christian Science Plaza which consists of a number of brutalist buildings:




Part of this plaza is The First Church of Christ, Scientist. There’s a nice rotunda at the entrance and so many beautiful domes inside.




After a break for lunch we stopped by the Boston Central Library. The Johnson Building, which is a newer addition to the original library and designed by Philip Johnson, was one of my favorite stops of the weekend. I spent most of my time in the main entrance focusing on the ceiling. We ran out of time but there are other areas worth photographing in there too.





The dome in Bates Hall of the McKim Building of the Central Library is really pretty.

Our next stop was City Hall. While standing in the plaza I noticed this great spiral staircase on the back of this building and loved all the different textures of the various buildings.

And some pics of the brutalist City Hall design.


The final stop of the afternoon portion of the workshop was the Stanley Saitowitz designed New England Holocaust Memorial. It’s a light, beautiful design in remembrance of so much horror. I can’t begin to summarize the meaning behind the design but I urge you to read about it here. Photographically, I found it challenging and kinda felt disrespectful concentrating on making images rather than taking in the memorial. But here are a few I managed.




After a break for dinner we headed to Lewis Mall Harbor Park for some sunset and blue hour cityscapes. The image at the beginning of the post was from there as well.

I’ll followup soon with a post about our second day, but if you’d like to see all the images from the weekend head over here.