Images and Notes » New York City

Guggenheim Museum – NYC

James Howe — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:23:05 +0000

(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 28mm, Exposure 1/250th sec @ f/11, ISO 200)

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 debated about just making a black and white image, but I wasn’t sure what to do with the bit of blue sky. I didn’t want it dark, and I didn’t want it light so in the end I decided just to keep the bit of blue.

Please feel free to leave any comments or questions you may have about this image below.

Chrysler Building – Another View

James Howe — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:03:14 +0000

(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 300mm, Exposure 1/2000th @ f/8.0, ISO 320)

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.

One of the problems with shooting tall buildings from the street is that certain elements are almost always in shadow. In this case when I was shooting up, the underside of the eagles were in shadow, and the building and sky were quite bright. The raw image managed to capture everything, there were no blown highlights or shadows, but the raw image was just a bit too bright and flat. In Lightroom 4, when I toned down the brightness of the sky and building, the shadows under the eagles blocked up and made it difficult to see the detail. I decided to create a virtual copy of the image and process it for the shadows and then blended the two layers in Photoshop. Once in Photoshop, I also made use of one of my ‘recipes’ to add some additional detail and style to the image. I used a combination of Detail Extractor, Reflector Efex and Levels and Curves to add detail and a bit of color to the image. In the Reflector Efex filter, I used the ‘Soft Gold’ option which is own reason the building is more gold than the silver color you normally associate with the building. In retrospect I probably should have tried the ‘Silver’ option, but I think the gold did a nice job on the sky and creates a unique look to the building itself. I finished things off by cropping out some of the sky, however, because I didn’t think the image needed that much sky.

If you have any comments or feedback, please leave them below. If you happen to be on 500px.com, feel free to stop by there as well to vote on this image, and other images I’ve posted there.

Food Vendor – Rockefeller Center

James Howe — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:41:22 +0000

(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.

Metropolitan Life Insurance Building Clock – New York City

James Howe — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:09:56 +0000

(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!

Chrysler Building – New York City

James Howe — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:09:19 +0000

(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.

Pier 54 – New York City

James Howe — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 04:03:42 +0000

(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!

Atlas and St. Patrick’s Cathedral – NYC

James Howe — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 18:31:01 +0000

(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 14mm (2x crop factor), ISO 200, 1/2 sec @ f/3.2)

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.

Always interested in hearing your thoughts. Please leave them below.

Guggenheim Museum – New York City

James Howe — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:00:21 +0000

(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 14mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, Exposure 1/200 sec @ f/4.5)

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. I boosted the detail of most of the image and then masked out the building. It gave the colored elements of the shot an interesting look, especially the taxi. However, at a smaller size the image looked to ‘crunchy’. So I then applyed Topaz Simplify and again masked out the building to create the final image. I still like the funky look of the yellow cab and I’ve always liked the way Simplify works on people as a way of de-emphasizing them.

As always, would love to hear your thoughts or questions.

Guggenheim #2

James Howe — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:35:01 +0000

(Olympus E-3, 7-14mm at 8mm (2x crop factor), ISO 125, Exposure 1/200 sec @f/6.3)

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 started out thinking I would try some perspective correction and some black and white work just to see where things might end up. I wanted to emphasize the texture of the building and wanted to get some interesting black and white tonalities. I took the image into Silver Efex Pro2 and ran through some of the presets. I settled on one of the presets which created a dark, but toned image with some edge vignetting. I didn’t want the toning, so I removed that. I also bumped up the structure to bring out more of the concrete surface. The end result was an image which sort of looked like a charcoal drawing. The image was a little flatter than I wanted, so I used curves to brighten the whites and darken some of the dark areas. I used Topaz Simplify to blur out the people in the bottom of the image, masking out the effect from the building. I then played with a couple of crops. The first thing I tried was a square crop, highlighting the ramp portion of the building. I wanted to look at some portion of the image and zoomed in. It was at that point that I saw a different crop, one which eliminated more of the bottom and gave a more elongated feel to the shot. The end result is what you see above.

Love to hear you thoughts on this, leave them in the comments below. Thanks!

Guggenheim, NYC

James Howe — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:40:51 +0000

(Olympus E-3, 7-14mm at 7mm (2x crop factor), ISO 1250, Exposure 1/30 sec @ f/4.0)

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.

Processing for this image consisted mainly of some noise reduction in Lightroom and conversion to black and white. I bumped the contrast a bit in Photoshop and also brightened the image somewhat. I didn’t want to brighten the skylight area so I ended up masking the curve in that area. You can see in the raw image below that the color balance is a bit yellow. I should have shot my Whibal card to have something to compare it with.

Comments and feedback are welcome and encouraged.