Mayo Clinic recently announced a $100 million gift from patient, philanthropist, and entrepreneur, Richard Jacobson will fund a new building to house the proton beam therapy program. Proton beam therapy is some cool stuff but that’s not what we’re here for.

New buildings funded by generous gifts are really nothing new for Rochester but this one happens to be the first one going up since I’ve taken a real interest in photography. Today was the ground breaking ceremony for the Jacobson building as well as the first day of my little project to document the construction progress. I have wanted to try some architecture photography and I though this would be a good introduction; sort of transition from landscape to architecture as the project progresses.

I plan to shoot the construction site once per week, weather permitting, for the duration of the project. The images over the first few weeks or so probably won’t be very compelling but I will share them anyhow.

This first one is taken from an adjacent parking ramp looking West-Southwest and the second is looking South:

The images are an HDR composite of three exposure bracketed shots processed in PSCS4 and tone mapped with the Photomatix plugin. I also did a slight distortion correction to compensate for my 12-24mm wide angle lens.