Last trip to a museum

I never did post some images I took during our last trip to a museum, at least for the foreseeable future, as all museums are closed due to the Covid lockdown. While I brought the Olympus OM-D E-M1X with the mZuiko 12-100 F/4 for the tour through the exhibitions of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, I never really got into the flow that evening, so the yield was rather limited, but there are a few shots that are worth sharing.

The Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Germanic National Museum) in Nuremberg is the largest cultural history museum in the German-speaking world. It houses around 1.3 million objects (of which 25,000 are on display) from early times to the immediate present.

The Significant Other and I started out in the Pre- and Early History department, displaying artifacts from 200,000 BC to 800 AD. As frequent readers of this blog know by now, I love shooting street photography in exhibitions and museums. The title image of this post is a great example, combining the silhouettes of a visiting couple gazing at the wonders of the golden headdress of a bronze age sun priest, made from a single lump of gold weighing 310g and around 3000 years old. This cone shaped hat was discovered 1953 on a farm field (actually just a few miles from our house) just a foot below the surface.

Another beautiful artifact that really caught my photographic eye is this bronze bull, a masterpiece of the celtic Hallstadt culture, cast in the 7th century BC.

Then we ventured on to the gallery with paintings from baroque, renaissance and enlightenment periods. Exhibition rooms with paintings are great places to shoot museum style street photography. Here, I used The Significant Other as unsuspecting subject.

What I learned that evening was that famous dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn shared pretty much the same hair color as The Significant Other, as you can see from his self portrait from 1629.

And here is an architectural shot to close out this museum session, an image from the cloister of the former Carthusian Monastery that is a central part of the buildings of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. The bird shaped steel sculpture on the back wall is from German sculptor Erich Hauser, made 1979.

So while the photographic yield of our visit was limited, I’m still happy with those six shots. Plus, upon exiting, I took a few high contrast monochrome shots of the wet streets outside that I already shared in this post.

All images are RAW converted and post processed in Lightroom Classic.

Next time you visit a museum or an exhibition, bring your camera for some museum style street photography.

Have a great Wednesday

Marcus

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Instant Inspiration (13)- Pictures in an Exhibition

Instant Inspiration (29) – Frame your subject

Soggy outside? Shoot in an exhibition!