Last week, I traveled east to visit my brother at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Without a doubt, the Lehigh campus is stunning. For those of you familiar with the University of Michigan campus, here’s a description of Lehigh: take U-M’s Law Quad, multiply it, and build it all into the side of a tree-covered mountain.

Praise the Lord and pass the architecture (25 July 2007).

The Packer Memorial Church, built in memory of Asa Packer’s wife by his daughter, is representative of the beauty of the rest of Lehigh’s campus.

Water you looking at? (25 July 2007)

The Alumni Memorial Building enjoys the company of a newly-constructed fountain, and that fountain provides a view I couldn’t resist.

The castle of knowledge (25 July 2007).

The Linderman Library is almost spectacular enough to make you forget about the books. The second picture shows the interior of the rotunda (slightly visible on the right side of the first picture); the third picture shows the view you get when you look up while you’re standing in the rotunda.

But Lehigh wasn’t all I saw during my trip. The city of Bethlehem has a rich industrial history; it was the home of Bethlehem Steel, once one of the largest steel companies in the world. But a changing market and internal problems toppled the seemingly-indestructible steel empire, and now its sprawling facilities — stretching for nearly two miles through southern Bethlehem — lie mostly abandoned, a crumbling reminder that nothing is too big or too powerful to be humbled.

(Current redevelopment plans promise to revitalize the site while preserving a number of the Bethlehem Steel buildings; sadly, the main cog of that plan is a casino.)

How the mighty have fallen (26 July 2007).

The first picture shows one of Bethlehem Steel’s previous headquarters; where once you might have approached the entrance and been impressed with the obvious power of the company, you now simply drive past a vacant building adorned with a name and logo that have been relegated to the dust bin of industrial history.

The second and third pictures show two of the older deteriorating structures; despite the poor condition, the stone construction is still beautiful.

The fourth picture shows what is likely the most-photographed landmark in Bethlehem: the Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces. The city and the site’s developers, wisely acknowledging the furnaces’ important place in the city history and skyline, have made the restoration of the furnaces part of the redevelopment plans.

(See the full Lehigh / Bethlehem gallery.)

Not just some-stars (21 July 2007).

Last Saturday, the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association held its annual high school football all-star game at Spartan Stadium in East Lansing.  The game featured a few local faces: Dexter’s Johnny Benjamin and Saline’s Charlie Moeller were on the field, and Dexter assistant coach Ken Koenig and head coach Tom Barbieri were on the sideline.  All four left with smiles: the West won the game, 9-7.  (For the purposes of the All-Star game, Detroit and a few nearby counties are East, and the rest of the state is West.)

(Full all-star game gallery.)

Phil, I call your name (20 July 2007).

Phil Wickham plays a show at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Macomb, MI on 20 July.  This was the show featuring the challenging lighting mentioned in the last processing post, but the candles were a nice bonus.

(Full gallery.)

On Friday, I attended a Phil Wickham concert; since I yam what I yam, I just so happened to have my camera in my hand during the show.

The lighting was essentially mood lighting, which is code for “not much”; the show was in a church, and there was no truly useful stage lighting with which to highlight the musician. So when they turned down the lights to achieve the preferred mood, they just made everything dim. In that situation, capturing usable images was a challenge — most concerts are challenges, but this one was even more of a challenge — and the images I did get required more work to take them from usable to worthwhile.

So, as an addition to the recent post concerning my photo processing, here is a before/after example from the Wickham show. (Click on the image to see the larger image.)

As the before image shows, to avoid an impossibly useless shutter speed (musicians are not inanimate objects!), I had to underexpose the images. Fortunately, uncompressed digital images are reasonably robust; after adjustments to the white balance and the exposure (among other things), the image isn’t stunningly award-winning, but it’s considerably improved.

Astute readers may wonder if the above picture is an example of my abandoning my own advice not to simply take a picture and plan to make it good on the computer; in response, I would say, “I never said that! It must have been another blog. Would you like a brownie?”

After the astute readers finished the brownies, I would also say that some situations require compromises in order to achieve a good end product; had I shot the Wickham show at a shutter speed that would have resulted in properly-exposed images, I would have ended up with a pile of blurry unrecognizable messes. I knew that I could work with an underexposed sharp image far more than I could work with a properly-exposed mess, so I made the necessary compromise to produce the sort of images I wanted. I don’t really want to make such compromises, but there are times they simply are not practically avoidable.

To be young, gifted and sweaty (18 July 2007).

Chelsea running back Nick Hill takes a break during passing camp. Hill, now a sophomore, made quite an impression his freshman year, breaking into the Bulldogs’ starting varsity lineup just a few games into the season. After showing occasionally dominant physical ability even as a freshman — at times dragging junior and senior defenders down the field, or breaking their tackles altogether — he is entering his sophomore season with high expectations.

(Full passing camp gallery.)

It is a fountain, but it is not of Wayne (01 July 2007).

Not long ago, I found an excuse to take another trip to Belle Isle: though my parents have lived in southeastern Michigan for about 40 years now, they had never visited Belle Isle.  So, two and a half weeks ago, we corrected that oversight.  And since it was a gorgeous day — yes, the sky really was a brilliant blue — I took the opportunity to take a few more pictures.

See the full gallery.