James J. Hill House

I had a commercial shoot at the James J. Hill house in St. Paul recently and used it as an opportunity to shoot a couple of images of this beautiful home, now a museum. Railroad magnate Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railway, built this Richardson Romanesque style house in 1891. He and his wife raised 10 children in this 36,000 square foot, 5 level mansion.

Because the home is illuminated at levels historically consistent with the gas and electric lighting available during this period, I used High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques which involves taking several photos at varying degrees of exposure to reveal the detail in the deep shadows as well as bright details in the windows. Processing with special software merges all of the exposures. The images were submitted to the HDR Yahoo Group with almost 500 members from around the World and received these responses:

"Excellent work, Steve."
"Real professional look..beautiful."
"Excellent, natural-looking processing on those, Steve!"
"Beautiful woodwork and the HDR shows off those wonderful details."

Be sure to click on each image to enlarge it:

Main part of the grand staircase:


The Library:


For more information,

www.stevesilvermanimaging.com

4445 W. 77th St. #130
Edina, MN 55435
952-844-0119 c952-905-1197
steve@stevesilvermanimaging.com