02.26.23: 42nd Street at night

I have many skyline, architectural or street scene photographs of New York City. It’s a very photogenic city and I’ve spent quite a bit of time there through the years walking the streets with my camera.

But my favorite photos of New York City are my nighttime shots.

The city takes on a new energy after sunset. The lights come on. The streets and sidewalks are as busy, if not more so, after dark as they are during the day.

It’s an energy that seems to find its way into nighttime photographs of the city. I can see it. I can feel it.

I captured this scene in late November 2005, when I was walking to the hotel after dinner. I had stashed a camera and lens in my briefcase as I often did on business trips and it came in handy.

I was crossing 42nd Street and looked to the east. 

It was a cold, damp evening and the lights of the city were reflecting off the streets and the low-hanging clouds. The Chrysler Building, with its cold, white lights, towered above the warmly-lit Grand Central Station and other neighboring buildings. I thought the scene looked interesting. It had both a cold look and warm look because of the mix of bluish and yellowish lighting.

I knew it would be difficult to capture detail in the wide range of bright lights and shadows, but I decided to give it a try.

I pre-focused the camera and made my exposure decision while I waited for the traffic light to change so I could cross the street. The shutter speed — 1/30th of a second — was going to be slow for a handheld shot so I needed to stand as still as possible and hope I could avoid camera shake, which would create a blurry image. When the light changed I walked to the middle of the intersection, turned toward the scene, braced my elbows tight to my sides to reduce camera shake and clicked off a few shots to increase the odds that one would be steady.

When I returned home a few days later I saw that I did have one crisp image of the scene but, as expected, the high contrast range made the scene less interesting than the one I saw with my eyes. A camera has a somewhat limited ability to capture scenes with a wide range of light intensities — shadows go dark and bright areas burn out. The human eye and brain can better interpret those scenes, retaining detail in both bright and dark areas.

So I saved the file and moved on to other photos.

A few years later, after Adobe released Lightroom (a photo editing software) and made several generations of enhancements and improvements, I revisited the image. I was able to lift detail in the shadow areas and restore detail in some burned-out bright areas, effectively reducing the contrast to better fit what I had seen that evening. After making some slight corrections in color balance, I had the photo I had hoped for. 

It only took about a decade, but I had finally captured the scene I saw that evening.