On a recent trip to New York City I had the opportunity to spend a little time outside the Guggenheim Museum. It was late in the day and I didn’t have the time to actually go inside so I decided to get some exterior shots. I’ve always been fond of the design of this museum and I wanted to capture some of its details. For me the two things that stand out about this museum is the unique inverted ziggurat he used as the main display area, and the typography used on the exterior lettering. The plain white concrete shapes with the simple black lettering really appeal to me. I was trying to capture something a bit more abstract than just a regular architectural shot so I played with different angles. I liked the angle on this shot, but the image was rather flat coming out of the camera. I used a few different tools in Lightroom 4 to help bring out the texture of the surface and to increase the contrast. Probably the change that had the most effect was bumping the clarity up to 100 while reducing the highlights and blacks.

I personally cannot get enough of the Chrysler Building in New York City. I’ve always loved this building and thought that it was far more attractive than the Empire State Building. I’m currently reading a book called “Height – A Race to the Sky and the Making of a City” by Neal Bascomb and it details the history of the building of the Chrysler Building along with 40 Wall Street and the Empire State Building. At the time there was enormous pressure to build the tallest building in the world and its fascinating to read about what went in to making this buildings. I’ve learned several things about the Chrysler Building, one of the more interesting tidbits is that Walter Chrysler funding the building personally, it wasn’t funded by Chrysler Corporation. Clearly the man had plenty of money. I think the things that I love about the Chrysler Building are all the wonderful Art Deco details. The metal work of the Eagles and the replicas of the 1929 Chrysler radiator caps are quite unique and I really like how they architect created the metal crown on top. It’s just a fabulous building.

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.

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 Woolworth 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.

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.

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 have a trip to New York City coming up soon and I’ve been going through some past images that I’ve taken in New York to get some ideas about what I might want to shoot on this trip. I came across this shot that I took of the Atlas statue located in Rockefeller Center, just across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I’ve worked on this image before but never really came up with something I really liked. I’ve tried various things to remove the extra buildings since I wanted the focus to be on Atlas and the cathedral across the street. I tried something new this morning. I used a couple filter in Color Efex Pro4 to bring out some detail in the shot and increase color saturation, and then I used a Film Noir preset in Silver Efex Pro 2 to convert the image to black and white. I made some additional adjustments and came up with the final image. I think it has a nice almost hand-drawn character to it. It’s not perfect, but I think it came out all right.

This is a shot of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City that I took a couple of years ago. It’s actually a panorama created from three shots (the original pano is shown below). I’ve actually been working on variations of this image since I took it. I’ve played around with a variety of ideas. I recently purchased theTopaz Labs Detail plugin and I experimented with it on this image.

This seems to be the time of year when I take a look through pictures I’ve shot in the past but never did anything with. Some of this is due to the fact that I haven’t really had the time or the motivation to go out and shoot new material. Some of it is just the simple fact that I like to browse my catalog for images which might be interesting to work with. The raw image that I took of the Guggenheim Museum in New York was not going to be one of those images. I didn’t particularly care for the composition, I didn’t like all the people in the shot, it just didn’t thrill me. So it was somewhat of a surprise to me that I picked this image to experiment with.

I don’t get to New York as often as I would like to any more. I used to be able to count on at least a couple of trips each year for work, but not so much any more. This particular image was taken a year ago when my wife and I visited New York for our wedding anniversary. It was the first time I had visited the museum and I certainly hope to get back to see it again. It was a cloudy and somewhat rainy day when we visited which meant that the skylight above was mostly white, instead of blue. The interior was not extremely bright, so I had to bump my ISO to 1250 to get a reasonable shutter speed. Unfortunately the camera I was using at the time, an Olympus E-3, doesn’t do well at higher ISO settings. I love the camera, I just wish it did better at higher ISO.