Escaping to Miami in early February just after record-breaking cold here in Chicago was most welcome! We spent 2 days photographing the best architecture and cityscapes the city has to offer. Plus I snuck in some cloud photos with the incredible sunset and sunrise we were lucky enough to experience, although not by the city’s building’s, unfortunately. Oh well, in a post coming soon I’ll share those pretty cloud photos 🙂
For today, let’s check out all the locations we saw on the first day of the workshop. First up, the many great stops in the Miami Design District. We’ll start with my favorite location there, the City View Parking Garage. One side has these raised, golden cutouts. Depending on the light and distance from the structure,  the facade takes on very different forms. These are just a few of my favorites from the morning.


The other side has cutouts but in a very different way and in these blue hues.


A short walk to a plaza with the Fly’s Eye Dome and a reflecting pool surrounding it. On this visit, I shot from the plaza but there’s a staircase in the middle with great look-ups.

Some nice geometry and light on the Tom Ford store below.

The next few are from the Museum Garage. The backside has these fun, colorful windows.

On the front of the garage are all these sculptural elements designed by various artists. There’s even info on the garage explaining a bit about each section.


Just across the street is the geometric facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami. Always a great location to play with light and tones, whether in black & white or color. The first one looks like a face, don’t you think?


Another face-like composition with the facade of the Rick Owens store.

This colorful ceiling in one of the plaza’s made for some nice symmetrical, yet asymmetrical compositions.

More geometry in this area with a tight shot of another store facade.

The Nuage Promenade is one of my favorite areas to photograph in the Design District, such fun with curves and layering with this colorful canopy.

Our final Design District stop was the Dash Fence. From a distance, you don’t notice the undulating shape of this, but once you get close it has this great wavy pattern. The camera was metering a bit blue and the hue was really pretty in this area so I left it despite the fence actually being white.


After a break for lunch, we stopped by a few locations in South Beach. The first was the Arquitectonica designed Miami Beach Convention Center. In this first shot, you can see the fins of the facade, which create more undulating patterns.

Getting up against the glass of the building and looking up you at those fins you get these great reflections and the intense blue sky against the white…always a nice color combo.


A short walk away is the New World Center designed by Frank Gehry. Instead of his usual stainless steel, we’re accustomed to, this is mostly white concrete. Again the blue sky was casting this hue on the facade so I left it during post-processing. Such a pretty tone.


After a little break we made a brief stop by the parking garage, 1111 Lincoln, designed by Herzog & De Meuron. A great brutalist structure.

We then ended the day with sunset and blue hour at Hobie Island. We had some really nice dramatic clouds and a break in them which lit up the city with these soft tones for a short while. The really beautiful and instense sunset was behind us, sadly not behind the city. Oh well, as I mentioned, I’ll share some of those cloud photos in a later post…stay tuned and soon I’ll share day 2 of the workshop as well!.

 
This is a small sample from the day, for all the workshop photos, head over here. If you’d like to stay in the loop on upcoming workshops sign up for the Photography Unfolded newsletter, which also gets you a free ebook on creating architectural abstracts!