New York, New York…

This is the city that I most wanted to revisit. For a photographer of architecture, New York has it all.  It is the home of skyscrapers, the Manhattan skyline, brownstones, movie and TV locations and a constantly evolving cityscape where the new is always updating the old.  Evolution at work, it’s an amazing city to visit.

Traveling in New York has become simpler than I recall in 2016, although the subway still manages to baffle, and it mostly looks one hundred years old, but it is cleaned of its famous graffiti. Everything is closer than I thought it was, and it’s surprising to finish photographing an iconic building to find that I was only a couple of streets away from another one. 

Not everything was available – the Flat Iron building was covered in scaffolding and sheeting, so impossible to photograph; and not everything was as available as I’d hoped it would be – the Oculus at the new world trade centre is constantly packed with people, inside and out, and if the sun shines the white of the building becomes impossible to manage. It took a couple of visits to get the shots we wanted.

We had six days of shooting. I’ve added some early pictures to this blog. I’ll start a new gallery for New York and there should be more photographs to come. 

The first ‘grail’ shot was the Oculus, a Calatrava designed building housing a shopping centre and a subway station. Surrounded by Skyscrapers it’s challenging to photograph and to give it its own space. It’s also perpetually crowded and if the sun shines there’s no controlling the contrast. We finally got the perfect viewpoint and weather and a three minute exposure removed the people. Fortunately the Port Authority security guard waited until we’d taken our last shot before moving us on. Tripods are not allowed apparently.

The next photograph is Wall Street and Pearl, a building that made an excellent mini-substitute for the Flat Iron Building which was under renovation. We were lucky with the weather, nice and overcast, and the passersby who were curiously absent.

I’ve shot a couple of towers in Germany from the viewpoint of stairways and subway exits and I wanted to do the same here, to show the juxtaposition of the old and the new. This shows the One World Trade centre from a subway station exit. Long exposure wasn’t necessary here, people leaving the station were sufficiently intrigued by what I was doing to stop and chat, allowing a clear people-free shot.

Below is the Manhattan Skyline, shot from Brooklyn. I shot this scene several times over almost an hour, from bright sunny evening until total dark. This one shows the blue hour look that I was after, and unusually, I haven’t changed the sky. A two minute exposure gave me plenty of time to chat to passersby who were invariably pleasantly curious and enjoyed seeing the images on the rear screen of the camera. Some of the people I spoke with were also amateur photographers looking for iconic New York scenes, so it was good to chat.

These photographs are the first edits of the many pictures taken on the trip. Not included at the moment are people shots taken in local parks – it was graduation weekend and New Yorkers take that very seriously – night life New York and images from the top of the Rockefeller centre. They will be included in a new ‘New York’ gallery, coming soon.