Minnesota State Capitol - The People’s House
The photos that make up this image were taken between 10:00am and 1:00pm on December 12th, 2018 from the East side of the top balcony of the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol in St Paul, MN. This is the third, and most ambitious, in a series of images that continues to fascinate me. I wanted to pick a time to make this photo when the legislature was not in session so that I could decide who would be edited into the final image and who gets left out. I spent hours over the next few months deciding the cast of characters.
When I started shooting the building looked and felt empty—Just me and a few pep-steppers doing a few laps of the lower corridors as a morning workout. Soon enough, the cast arrived: middle schoolers on a field trip; businessmen planning some sort of function; custodians pushing carts; earnest campaign workers who had recently become Governor Tim Walz's transition team; history buffs and folks with this or that personal or professional business in the Capitol. Each character is presented exactly where they were photographed. They all evidentially have stories which this photo may reveal some small part.
This is not a sunset photo with a single point of interest. This is, instead, a study of human movement and an opportunity for the viewer to fantasize. I encourage you to find a character and follow him or her through the photo and imagine their back story. The image was made with my Nikon D850 with a 14mm - 24mm lens zoomed in to 14mm. I was shooting a ISO1000 with an exposure of 1/40 of a second at ƒ5.6. I shot on a tripod without moving the camera. The entire shoot totaled 970 images. One hundred seven of them were used as layers in Photoshop to make this picture. It took five months to finish this image.
