Atlas – Rockefeller Center
by James Howe on Apr.25, 2012, under New York
(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 70mm, Exposure 1/15 sec @ f/5.6, ISO 800)
Whenever I visit New York City I like to spend some time around Rockefeller Center. I love the Art Deco styling of the buildings and the sculptures. An impressive example of this is the statue of Atlas, which stands directly across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The statue shows Atlas holding up the world and was created by sculptor Lee Lawrie with help from Rene Paul Chambellan. The statue was installed in 1937. I’ve always admired this statue for it’s strong Art Deco style. When I was in New York this time, I wanted to make sure I got a close up of the statue. In close you can really appreciate the detail work that makes the statue so stunning.
Processing occurred mostly in Lightroom 4 with a conversion to black and white using Silver Efex Pro 2. In the original image there were several hot spots on the statue caused by the lighting. With Lightroom 4 (and perhaps because of the D800), I was able to use the highlight slider to remove almost all of the hotspots. If you look at the part of the statue over Atlas’ right shoulder (left side of image) in the original, you will see that there is a big blown out highlight. In the finished image you can actually see detail in that area, all due to the ability to recapture detail from what appeared to be blown out highlights.
If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them below.
Copyright ©2012 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
Food Vendor – Rockefeller Center
by James Howe on Apr.23, 2012, under Travel
(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 125mm, Exposure 1/125th @ f/5.6, ISO 1000)
New York City is full of food vendors, in parts of the city you can’t go a block without seeing one or more. This guy was set up just outside of Rockefeller Center on 5th Avenue. I shot this from the sidewalk as I walked by. Processing was pretty simple. I made a minor rotation correction in Lightroom, did some tweaking of the highlights, contrast etc to adjust the look and add a bit of richness to the image. The biggest change was created by using extreme settings in Clarity and Luminance noise reduction.
The Clarity slider in Lightroom 4 has improved greatly and you can achieve some interesting effects by pushing it to 100. Previously you had to be more careful with Clarity because it could introduce some horrible artifacts. Lightroom 4 is much better. The image was shot at ISO 1000 which had some noise, but the D800 is pretty clean but I wanted to use the noise reduction in a more creative way. By sliding it to almost 100, it imparted a slightly ‘plastic’ look to the shot which I liked.
Feel free to leave any comments or questions below.
Copyright © 2012 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
Metropolitan Life Insurance Building Clock – New York City
by James Howe on Apr.18, 2012, under Architectural Details
(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 250mm – extreme crop, Exposure 1/500 @ f/8.0, ISO 400)
One of the things I love about visiting New York City is all the wonderful architecture. Everywhere you look you can find buildings with interesting shapes and details. This image shows the clock face from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building. You can see from the picture the great detail work put in to creating this clock, details which most people would never see from the street. I especially like the detail work done with the tiles of the clock face.
Producing this image was somewhat interesting. A couple of days ago I posted an alternative version of this image to my New York album. As you can see below, the raw camera shot shows a lot more of the building. The image I posted to G+ cropped things down to showing mostly the clock. I got a question from a viewer asking me about the green color and whether it was copper or something else. I went back to Lightroom and zoomed in to see if I could find out more. When I did, I was surprised at the level of detail found at that level of magnification. (click the image above to view larger) I could see the texture of the individual tiles. I used a rented D800 combined with my 28-300mm lens to take the shot and I’m certainly happy with the details that the 36 megapixels could capture. I decided right then that I wanted to create an image out of this tight crop which is the image you see above.
Please feel free to leave comments below!
Copyright ©2012 James W. Howe – All rights reserved
Chrysler Building – New York City
by James Howe on Apr.16, 2012, under Architecture
(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 250mm, Exposure 1/1000 sec @ f/8.0, ISO 320)
One of the joys of visiting New York City is the wonderful architecture of its buildings, both old and new. One of my favorite buildings in New York is the Chrysler Building, and one of the main reasons I like it so much is all the wonderful Art Deco details used in its design. Nothing is more iconic that the metal top which adorns this building. I took this shot on the last day of a recent trip to New York. I wasn’t able to get a nice night shot, so I worked with what was available. I was using my 28-300 lens on a rented D800 and I took numerous shots of the building from various angles. What I really wanted was an extreme close-up, but by the time you get far enough away from the building to have a nice angle on the top, even 300mm doesn’t get you very close. What I ended up doing for this shot was to crop a section out of larger image to get the detail that I wanted. Fortunately I was shooting with a rented D800 which has 36 megapixels to work with. Even after a very tight crop the image is still quite large and detailed.
I tried a couple of different ideas for processing. My initial thought was to try and get a nice clean black and white but I just couldn’t come up with something I liked. As I usually do, I looked through some of the presets in Silver Efex Pro2 to see if I could find a base look that I liked. Turns out it was the last preset, the ‘Pinhole’, which I liked the best. It created a nice strong vignette which drew my eye to the triangular windows, and it created an almost smoky look to the sky. I played with the default preset settings to improve the image, the default was too bright in the center and washed out some of the detail. What I find humorous is the fact that I used a $3000 digital SLR with medium format resolution to create a final image that looks like it was taken with nothing more than a pinhole camera. Of course, a pinhole camera would never have been able to get this shot.
Love to hear your thoughts on this one.
Copyright ©2012 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.
Pier 54 – New York City
by James Howe on Apr.15, 2012, under Travel
(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 250mm, Exposure 1/250 sec @ f/11, ISO 250)
Anyone who knows history, or who has been reading any papers lately knows that this is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ ship, Titanic. I’m visiting New York, and while I’m here I got the chance to see a bit of Titanic history in person. The ship was originally supposed to dock in New York city at Pier 59. Of course, the ship sank before it reached New York. The Cunard ship Carpathia managed to pick up the survivors and when they arrived at New York, they first visited Pier 59 to drop off the lifeboats and then returned to Pier 54 to drop off the passengers. Both Pier 54 and 59 were demolished years ago, Pier 59 is now just a bunch of stumps sticking out of the water, but Pier 54 at least still has this iron gate marking it’s entrance. If you look carefully, you can see writing which says Cunard and White Star Line. The liners merged after the Titanic disaster.
I took this shot from the High Line in New York City, and wonderful linear park which repurposes an old elevated subway line. My goal in processing the image was to help bring out the details of the lettering on the metal, as well as give the image a bit of an old time feeling. I used a combination of Color Efex Pro 4 and Silver Efex Pro 2 to do most of the work.
Certainly love to hear your thoughts on this, or if you have any more bits of history about the Pier.
Thanks!
Copyright ©2012 James W. Howe – All rights reserved.