I couldn’t help myself. I was supposed to post this later on when I wake up in the morning, but I was a little too excited.
I decided to make an attempt at long exposure photography, and since the apartment we’re staying at is on the 12th floor, it was a pretty decent view. You may notice this isn’t what most people would picture New York City to be, but I have to tell you that it isn’t glamorous all throughout — and that’s what I loved about it. I love the grittiness of the city, even while on Manhattan and not on the other boroughs like Queens or Brooklyn.
We all have this certain picture of New York — tall skyscrapers everywhere, bright lights, all the people nicely dressed in designer labels, basically like something out of the movies we watch. It was a surprise to me that The Big Apple isn’t all that. That’s just a small portion. What I wanted to show in this single photograph is the more “real” side of New York (though Times Square, Madison Square Garden, Broadway, and all those fancy places are indeed real as well).
I decided I wouldn’t cheat with this photo’s technicalities by doing some heavy editing (not that I do that often). I didn’t touch the exposure, since it would have been pointless to have used my Bulb setting. All I did was a little digital magic on the colors — I wanted to make it a little more blue dashed with gray, and a hint of goldish tones here and there. My peg was Gotham City, hahaha! Of course I gave this photo a more real look to it, since Gotham is technically a fictional place, and the filming of the Dark Knight trilogy (majority of it, anyway) was filmed in good ol’ New York.
Don’t mind the weird lights in the sky, those are just reflections from inside the apartment. I shot against the window, as I did not want my camera falling 12 stories down onto concrete and dying a tragic death.
Anyway, yeah. There definitely is more to New York City than a lot of us would initially think. And again, more on that in a later post. :)
(Source: blog.tracymonsod.com)
