Sunset light illuminates tall columns of the Standard Hotel along the High Line Elevated Park in Chelsea, New York City.
This is another photograph from our Friday evening walk along the High Line Elevated Park in Chelsea. We walked under the Standard Hotel, which straddles the park at this point, just as the warm and saturated pre-sunset light was peaking. Given the quality of the light and the beautiful evening, I was surprised that there were no people on the other side of the plexiglas wall – there were certainly plenty of us enjoying the evening along the walkway of the park.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Night photograph of a person sitting behind a blue sign along 7th Avenue near Madison Square Garden on a summer evening in downtown New York.
On our last night in Manhattan we needed pizza – we bracketed our visit with New York pizza on the first and last night. (We had lots of great food in between, but that is perhaps a story for another post.) So we headed out of our hotel and up 7th Avenue near twilight. My son – who shoots old film cameras these days – and I grabbed our cameras to see what we could shoot. Keeping things simple, I just stuck a 50mm lens on my camera, cranked the ISO, and shot quickly as we moved through the crowds. Nearby there was a building with a “sign” that moved blue text up and down the front of a building and across part of the sidewalk. Sitting behind a section of the garish sign I saw this man sitting quietly.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Evening photograph of an urban parking lot near the High Line Elevated Park in the Chelsea area of New York City.
I photographed this parking facility from above as we started down the stairs at the north end of High Line Park. Since I was traveling light at this point I had no tripod – so I made this 1/8 second exposure hand-held. (Image stabilization can be your friend!) Lighting was, to say the least, tricky. Areas of the structure were in deep shadow, but there were also bright artificial light directly within the frame. By some miracle I managed to pretty much capture the full dynamic range in one shot.
These parking elevators are seen all over Manhattan, and they allow cars to be parked several deep on the vertical lift. This was the first time I had the opportunity to shoot one from a position that wasn’t on the ground, and the complicated mass of vertical beams filling the space and lit by artificial light sources seemed like an interesting subject. I haven’t seen the elevators in operation, so I still wonder how the lot operators manage to get the right cars at the top/bottom of each lift so that each person’s car will be at ground level at the right time.
An airplane crosses a cloud-filled New York City sky above the Standard Hotel at the High Line Park in Chelsea.
This hotel straddling the High Line Elevated Park in New York City presents a striking appearance, especially when the right clouds are reflected in its glass-window surface. We were in the area on a summer evening when the sky was filled with interesting clouds, and by the time we finished walking to and then along the elevated path of the High Line park we had seen it from quite a few angles.
This was my first visit to New York City in a decade, and I have to say that coming to terms with it as a photographic subject is a tall task for someone trying to take in the whole thing for (not quite) the first time. I do a lot of street and urban photography, but usually in places with which I’m familiar – San Francisco is a short train ride from where I live, so I photograph there a lot. For me, it takes some time to get beyond the overwhelming first impressions and settle down and achieve a level of comfort with the place. There were days in New York when, despite being in the midst of tremendous numbers of photographic opportunities, I found it almost impossible to figure out what to shoot. And there were also certain times when “the light came on” and I made a lot of photographs, including this evening.
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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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