One week from tomorrow, on Saturday, September 25th, St. Petersburg residents will get the chance to experience Arts Alive Free Museum Day!  St. Petersburg’s major museums will throw open their doors and welcome everyone in, free of charge! This will be the sixth annual event, done in coordination with the Smithsonian Institute and Smithsonian Magazine. The event is taking place in many major cities around the country, so if you’re not near St. Petersburg, be sure to check your local media for details in your area.  But for St. Petersburg, I can tell you that you will be welcomed, at no cost, at the following great museums:

• The Dali Museum
• Dr. Carter G. Woodson Museum
• Florida Holocaust Museum
• Great Explorations Children’s Museum
• Morean Arts Center and Hot Shop
• Museum of Fine Arts
• Pier Aquarium
• St. Petersburg Museum of History

For more details, such as addresses, museum hours, description of current exhibitions, etc,  you can check out this link  on the City of St. Petersburg’s website.

And if you’d like a larger version of any of the photos shown here, just click on the individual image.

A new exhibit opened at the St. Petersburg Museum of History last Friday night, blending HDR techniques with history in a way that should be very appealing to anyone who appreciates St. Petersburg’s past.  The exhibit is called “Images of the Past Meet the Photography of the Future”.  A museum curator selected 32 historic photos from their archives, pictures of notable St. Petersburg places from many years ago.  Then, a group of 14 photographers from the North Pinellas Photography Forum set out to recreate the historic photos in today’s world, using modern equipment and HDR techniques.  The exhibit involves the pairing of the historic image next to the new HDR image for each photograph. 

I attended the opening reception on Friday night and I was extremely impressed.  Many of the new photographs were stunning, and it was just very fun to see the old images recreated in this manner.   If you’d like to see the photographs, the exhibit will continue at the Museum for awhile – it’s definitely worth a trip downtown to see these photos!  For information about the Museum, including location, hours, etc, go to their web site. 

And if you would like to see a few examples of HDR photography that are my own work, check out these examples in earlier blog posts of mine: example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4.