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Saturday, November 13, 2010

Victoria Pacifica

While I like the BW treatment of yesterday's post I realized after I'd posted it that it makes the sculpture look like a cement cast. Black and white emphasizes the form more than the color, which was what I was looking for. But this classic style sculpture is fittingly done in classical material (bronze?) with that lovely green patina, so today's photos are in color. This sculpture, flanked by two smaller pieces, is on the Westsong Walkway in front of some condominiums. A plaque beneath it identifies it as "Victoria Pacifica" by John Barney Weaver. On the same plaque is some verse by Robert G. Evans:

The sea muse sought an Eden isle
Soaring on dolphins' wing
Where emerald knights in helmets white
Guard shores of endless spring.
She cast a crown of blossom jewels
Anointing this sun blessed land
Victoria's writ in nature's script
By the ocean's timeless hand.

6 comments:

JoJo said...

Oh it's Bronze!!! That makes more sense now! I was thinking yesterday that if it was made of cement and in the USA, some jerk would have snapped her hair off by now. Canadians are so much more respectful and civilized than we are.

The entire sculpture is simply beautiful! And the poem brought tears to my eyes.

Mike Laplante said...

Weird. Periodically, some of your images have an almost CGI look to them on my laptop monitor. Your second one of the face -- nice shot BTW -- looks like something out of a old-school Ray Harryhausen flick. It's a combination of the texture and the lighting.
A similar thing happened with your Craigdarroch Castle photos some time ago.
What software do you use to process your images?

Dean Lewis said...

That is a great work and it's aquatic theme is perfect there facing the harbour.

This sculpture by John Weaver and other artworks are listed on Land Marks Public Art in the capital regional district on the link to Jeff Maltby from the earlier mural posting this week.

Thanks Ben!

Benjamin Madison said...

Thanks JoJo - I agree - this is a lovely sculpture.

Mike - Today's topmost photo was 3 exposures HDR processed in Photomatix Pro 4.0.1, then further edited (saturation, levels, straightened, cropped, sharpened and scaled) in GIMP 2.6.10. The top photo was shot using a 10-20 mm wide angle lens at 20mm. The bottom photo was shot using a 500mm telephoto to isolate the face from its surroundings and flatten it a bit to improve the focus. It had very little processing - just a little bump of the saturation, contrast and sharpening and then scaled in GIMP.

That's fairly typical for how I process. If something looks better in HDR I use photomatix and Gimp. If not I just use GIMP for processing.

Dean thanks for the additional info.

Jack said...

I'm for the color photos. I particularly like the bottom photo, isolating on her expression.

SRQ said...

Thanks for the clarification. Love the perspective with those of the photos.