Midtown Manhattan at Night

I decided to take a late evening stroll around Manhattan with the camera last Thursday when I had the evening to myself. I was in the mood for pizza and an eggcream, so off I went to find a pizza joint and a diner and headed towards Washington Square Park. NYC is one of those places that is just as fascinating, if not more fascinating, at nighttime than during the day. Obviously, Times Square should be photographed at night when the lights are at their peak of seeming out of this world. But the rest of Manhattan takes on a different life at night.

One structure that I wanted to be sure to photograph, and only at night, was the Washington Square Park Arch. With the intricate work on the arch, nighttime is the best time to photograph it, in my opinion. I didn’t exactly have the best focal range with me for what I wanted to do this time around with the Tokina 16-28mm, but I think I was able to take a different approach and come out with a few usable images. I was also lacking the use of a tripod, which caused me to have to take images with high ISO and wide apertures. I was able to deal with some of the image noise using post processing noise removers, but I noticed that even shooting at ISO 1600 and f/2.8, camera shake got the best of most of my images. The ones I’m sharing with you below are the best of the bunch, but if you look closely enough, you’ll either be able to tell that I took it at a wide aperture or may notice the slight blurriness of the camera shake. Regardless, I had a great time, damn it!!

Washington Square Park itself is not as interesting at night as it is during the day, but I did get to see a number of musicians playing in the park before sunset. Later on in the evening, I was able to see the start of an anti-feminist protest, but made my way away from them in case they got a little too rowdy. They were chanting something under their breath that I couldn’t make out. So to make sure that they weren’t chanting “let’s get that Cuban with the camera”, I bolted out of there and headed off for pizza.

I came back later and hung out in the park people watching and snapped off a few pictures of the foot traffic. I liked some of the perspectives I had with the wide-angle, but was kicking myself the entire time because of the lack of tripod…

On the way back to the hotel, I asked the cabbie to drop me off near the Chrysler building and snapped off a few images of my favorite skyscraper while I was at it. Again, I needed a tripod…

The lesson for tonight, boys and girls, is to experiment with nighttime photography as much as possible, but be sure to bring along a tripod to be able to overcome camera shake. Even though image stabilization capabilities on your camera equipment will help combat this a bit, Canon does not offer any image stabilization on their wide-angle lenses, and neither do any of the third-party manufacturers. In that respect, I was screwed from the start, but I made it out there anyway. I hope you enjoy these images and have a great night!!

Photographic Composition in the St Paul Churchyard in Lower Manhattan

I decided to take the subway down to lower Manhattan in hopes to visit the 9/11 memorial and pay my respects with it being my first trip to NYC since 1997. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that you have to reserve your tickets to view the memorial with a LOT of advance notice online. So, I had to forego visiting it this time around, but I promise you that I’ll head back next year and will plan better. In the meantime, there was plenty to visit and photograph while down in Lower Manhattan.

Almost right across the street from the 9/11 Memorial Visitor’s Center, there stands the oldest surviving church building in all of Manhattan. St. Paul is an Episcopalian church that has a small cemetery that can be visited during the daytime and I spent over an hour wandering around and photographing. While the church itself was closed, I had plenty to photograph in the cemetery yard.

Old cemeteries are some of the most interesting places to practice photography. Whether you are into color or black & white, you can find a myriad of interesting tombstones or mausoleums with all sorts of interesting textures that cast shadows. If you happen to be at a real old cemetery, then you have the added factor of aged pieces that may carry a history all to themselves. I find cemeteries like St. Paul’s as some of the most interesting, as some of its inhabitants have been there since the mid 1700’s.

I was still working with the Tokina 16-28mm wide-angle lens that I mentioned in one of my earlier posts. Even though it was a wide-angle, I was trying to show that even a wide-angle can be used for things other than wide-angle shots. Luckily, this lens allowed for a minimum focus distance of 11 inches, which means that it could focus on anything 11 inches away from the lens or further. Granted, this isn’t a macro lens, so I can’t get much closer than a foot away, it still did a great job of capturing a number of rather up close shots that I was going after.

I enjoyed playing with the aperture to go after increased depth of field when photographing tombstones that were in a row. One technique that I will do, as in one of the first photos where you see three tombstones in a row, is that I will set the lens to the largest aperture setting, which in this case was f/2.8, and will focus on the tombstone closest to me. Next I will take a somewhat identical image while focused on the second tombstone. Yet again, I’ll take another with the focal point being the next tombstone in line. I usually don’t go too overboard, but I will come back home with a few images that are similar since I can’t really view the image as I would like to with only using my little 2.5 inch LCD screen on the back of the camera. I’ll get home and absolutely love one of them, while the others are just bound for the recycle bin. But, I came home with all the shots for me to choose once I was able to look at them on my computer screen as a large image. I started doing this when I thought I was being all badass and had the perfect viewpoint only to find that I had messed up the image and didn’t have anything else to work with. The lesson learned that time, is not to come home with just one image of something that captures my interest. Hell, sometimes I’ll go buck wild and set the shutter speed to high-speed priority and will shoot off a series of up to 6 images in under a second just to have several of the same to view later on.

Another thing I do as I walk around is to look at how the light and shadows are behaving. There is one image below that I loved because the tombstones were getting the hard, warm sunlight hitting it directly, while everything else was caught in the shadows or shade. This brought out the detail in the tombstones and made them pop. In one of the pictures, you can even see me as the photographer. While I don’t usually like this kind of photo, I found this one especially hilarious since at quick vision it appears that I’m trying to pull my hair out. I promise you that I still have all my hair and it was the shadows of my holding up the camera to my face.

I did shoot one photo from the outside of the cemetery after it had closed where you can see that I’ve shot through two of the steel bars in the fence. One thing about composition of photographs is to keep in mind which way you are holding the camera (whether in landscape or portrait mode) and the direction of the shapes being captured in the image. In this image, the composition works cause I am holding the camera in the portrait mode (vertical) and the tombstones and fence bars that I’m shooting through are all in the vertical mode as well. Had I shot this image while holding the camera in the landscape mode (horizontal), the image may have still worked, but the flow would not have been as good since your eye is drawn more to objects that would run the length of the image and not straight up and down. But, the good thing is that there is no right or wrong way of doing things. So, I would recommend to experiment with different positions and find what makes you happy and gives you the most pleasing image.

Go out and photograph something!!!

Midtown Manhattan Is Beautiful In Dreary and Rainy Weather

Most folks would think that dreary, overcast or rainy weather is time to put their cameras to sleep. But, if you know what to look for, you would be surprised at the awesome images you can take by waking that camera up and taking it out for a walk. Obviously, I am not endorsing going out in pouring rain where you will not only get soaked, but your camera equipment’s weather resistance may be put to the test. That kind of experiment may end up a very expensive one if you don’t have pro level equipment. Better yet, let me describe the weather I was faced with in Manhattan last Monday when I flew in. The forecast was of 50% precipitation with an overcast day. It was pretty dreary, and yes, it did rain on and off, but it was a very light series of showers that I was able to wait out under overhangs or in assorted shops while pretending to be a shopper. The sky was completely gray and it made everything look colorless.

I would have thought like a great deal of you to just stay in the hotel room and rest up for the week-long marathon of meetings, but I was determined to take advantage of my being in Manhattan while a few hours with an open schedule. Then, I remembered a few years ago reading an article somewhere that said that dreary and overcast weather is the perfect opportunity to photograph in black and white. So, with this in mind, I headed out of the hotel with a small umbrella in hand ready to take on that colorful world with a black and white mentality.

My camera has a black and white preset, but I chose to shoot in color to see what would happen and later adjust the image to black and white in post processing using Photoshop or something of the sort. I did a fair amount of walking around all of Midtown Manhattan, but focused most of my efforts around the mile or so area surrounding the hotel to make a quick getaway back to the sanctuary of my room if it got to wet outside. I visited Grand Central Station, the Chrysler Building, The Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

I photographed Grand Central Station inside and out, and featured a few of the indoor shots earlier this week. The Chrysler Building has been one of my favorite buildings for a very long time, probably since I became aware of architecture and how it can be the artistic expression of an engineering and structural masterpiece. I don’t care that it’s not the tallest building in the city or the country. I fell in love with the art deco styling that makes it one of the architectural wonders of this country.

What I do care is that it no longer has an observation deck, and hasn’t had one in my lifetime. From what I’ve been able to find on the internet, the last time the Chrysler building had an observation deck was back in the 40’s. I can only imagine that the Empire State Building being much taller, offered visitors a higher view that left the Chrysler Building in the shadows. What surprises me is that today’s inhabitants of the upper floors of the building haven’t thought of opening it back up and charging admission for a glance out of that iconic building. Hell, I would pay $40 to $50 to hang out for 1/2 and hour on one of the upper floors that have the Chrysler eagles on the sides just for the photo opportunity. That building oozes BADASSNESS!!!

I have a funny story that I’ll share with you. Later in the week, I had dinner open to myself, so I thought I would get out there and see what trouble I could get myself into. Then I thought that it would be pretty cool to find a restaurant that was close by to the Chrysler building, possibly get a window seat that faced it and take the camera along for a good meal and some great up close pics. I had seen in my room that the hotel featured a top floor restaurant that boasted great views. It was a little pricey, but I figured I’d call to get a little more detail.

My first call was to the front desk. I’ll keep my part in standard text and will italicize their responses. I kinda went like this: Front desk. Hi, I was thinking of having dinner at the restaurant on the top floor and was curious if you knew what kind of view I would have. Well, you would see all of Manhattan. Okay, well, from the pictures on the brochure here in the room it looks like all I would see is Queens. No, sir, you could ask for a view of Manhattan. Okay, do you know if we can see the Chrysler Building from here? Absolutely; would you like me to make you a reservation? Nah, I think I’ll hold off a bit and think about it. Then I hung up. It was pretty weird, so I thought to call the restaurant itself. Here is that conversation.

Blah blah blah restaurant, may I help you? Hi, I am a guest at the hotel and was just asking the front desk if you guys would happen to have a view of the Chrysler Building from any one of your tables. Well, sir, we haven’t seen the Chrysler Building in about 15 years. Do you mean that you haven’t been allowed to leave the building in 15 years?? No, sir, I mean that in the last 15 years another building has obstructed our view of the Chrysler Building. Oh, the way you said it sounded weird. Well, if you’d like to come up for dinner, I can sit you at a table that gives a view of a building that resembles the Chrysler Building. But it wouldn’t be the Chrysler Building?? No, but most people can’t tell the difference at night. Well, I can and wouldn’t want to be staring at a building that looks like the Chrysler Building if it isn’t the Chrysler Building. (At this point, the conversation starts to get testy by both parties…) At what time would you like to make your reservation? Well, I don’t want a reservation if I can’t have a view of something interesting. Do you have a view of anything else? Well, the Empire State Building is further away, but I can offer a corner table by the window that would give you a partial view. Partial view? What’s that? Well, it means that if you lean a little towards the window, you are able to catch the corner of the Empire State Building. Oh, well I once sat through the Phantom of the Opera in a “partially obstructed view” seat and it really sucked. I would venture to say that this might suck as well. You may be right, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with? Nah, thanks for your time, you were very helpful. Click…

I ended up going out for pizza down the street from the Empire State building, but that was just one of many odd conversations I had while in NYC…

Going back to my photos, the color renditions of the following photos I am sharing with you came out very bland and flat due to the dark and gray sky. They almost looked to be black and white, even though they were taken in color format, because of the weather. I converted all of these to black and white using Photoshop and enhanced the sky a bit by bringing out the contrast in the angry and rolling clouds. I added a little sharpness and away we go…

After photographing the Chrysler Building, I made my way over towards Rockefeller Center. I stopped at St. Patrick’s Cathedral only to find it covered in scaffolding on one entire side. I did have a very enjoyable photo session inside that I will share with you guys tomorrow. After leaving the cathedral, I went over to Rockefeller Center and decided to spring for the admission ticket to the observation deck. It was totally worth it, even if the admission ticket gal warned me that the observation deck wasn’t offering a clear view of much of the city that day. I decided to go up anyway and still enjoyed myself. The pic of the Empire State Building with the city all around was taken from the Rockefeller Observation Deck.

The black and white photo of the Brooklyn Bridge that I featured yesterday was thrown in just to give an example of what can be done with pictures even on the clearest days in black and white. It is simply a classic medium that will never go out of style and adds class to just about any image if contrasted well. Enjoy!!