NY Through the Lens - New York City Photography

New York City night. Rain. Bryant Park. Midtown.

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Through eyelashes wet with rain,

a thousand thoughts fall

to the ground

and through the raindrops

the city lights blur together

as shadows make their way

into the night -

impermanence

registered with

every blink.

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New York City Skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge. Night lights bokeh.

If you stop to squint long enough

all the dreams whispered on the wind during the day

flicker like fireflies when the evening

stretches out across the sky

and the rain washes the city’s despair away

so it can dream itself into another sunrise.

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This was taken on earlier this evening with the Sony A99 overlooking the New York City skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn. I was taking long exposures earlier this evening and as the sky filled with enormous clouds shortly after sunset as the city’s lights sprinkled themselves like glitter all over the evening cityscape and it was as if everything else melted away.

These are the moments I want to bottle up and save for later. And that’s why I absolutely love photography.

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View “Brooklyn Bridge at Night - New York City” in my photography portfolio here, email me, or ask for help.

Under the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. Midtown. New York City

I had a recurring dream when I was younger that puzzled me for years. It involved boarding a hovering bubble shaped vehicle and ascending over the skyscrapers until I was soaring under the bridges and through the cavern-like spaces of the city. It was euphoric but also terrifying at the same time. When I was older, I finally relayed the dream to someone and they laughed and asked if I had ever taken the Roosevelt Island tram when I was very young. I had no recollection of it. It prompted me to ask my mother if we had ever done such a thing and she said it was possible but she couldn’t remember a specific time that we would have done it (my mother, like me, is absolutely terrified of heights). It’s possible that my family took the tram to Roosevelt Island at some point and the experience embedded itself deep into my imagination where it mixed with other flights of fancy (pun intended) of flying through a Gotham-like city like Batman.

So, when I found myself photographing the underbelly of the 59th Street Bridge (also known as the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge or just the Queensboro Bridge) with the Sony A99 late last week, it was hard not to recall those earlier dreams and feelings they invoked while I stood there waiting for the long exposure to capture 30 seconds of what had haunted me for years. The bridge is one of my favorite ones in the city. Its architecture is distinctive when viewed from the side but I absolutely love how slick and dripping-with-sci-fi-overtones it appears when viewed from below. The bridge travels from darkness into the light of a gleaming New York City as the water below it only stirs with the occasional disruption of a boat. You can also make out the cables that the Roosevelt Island tram travels on to the right of the bridge.

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New York City skyline and Chrysler Building - view from Roosevelt Island

My recent foray into experimenting with long exposures has been blossoming into a zen journey. I am a solitary shooter by preference. While I thrive on being around people, when I am shooting it’s an almost spiritual experience that I enjoy only when I am alone. The world tends to melt away and my thoughts evaporate into whatever it is I am shooting. I am not sure if it is because my mind runs at around 1000 miles per hour normally and resembles a rushing waterfall of activity that I seek out these types of experiences where I can calm the mental flow into a gentle stream of thoughts but I am finding long exposures to be an absolutely blissful experience.

This is the result of a 20 second exposure taken late last week from Roosevelt Island with the Sony A99. I have been shooting skylines for the past month for a secret project that I can’t talk about until later this month and it’s been interesting viewing the skyline from different vantage points throughout the boroughs. Roosevelt Island is a tiny island that sits in the East River overlooking the Upper East Side and midtown Manhattan. The Chrysler Building is a beacon of white, sparkling lights in a sea of skyscrapers lit by the yellow glow of the lights on the FDR Drive. It’s a rather calm place to visit at this time of year since it’s not quite warm enough for people to take full advantage of the promenade that runs parallel to this amazing view.

The night tends to fall quietly over the lights of Manhattan when viewing the skyline from this vantage point. The only sounds that are prominent are the sound of waves lapping up against the sides of the promenade as the rare boat speeds by. I find it endlessly fascinating how a long exposure can calm even those sounds down visually - smoothing out the water’s surface until the lights seem to melt into the water like liquid stars in a watery universe.

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New York Winter - Snowy night in midtown Manhattan

New York City resembles a snow-globe when snow first falls.

As the snow swirls, the trees reach over the city streets as if they are trying to catch snowflakes with their bare, graceful branches.

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This was taken at night during a winter storm in New York City that dropped enough snow to turn the city into a winter wonderland momentarily. This is the area on 42nd Street next to Bryant Park across from the Grace Building which can be seen partially on the left-hand side of the image.

It’s one of my favorite spots to snow-gaze at night.

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Taken with the Sony A99.

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New York Winter. 5th Avenue in the snow. Midtown.

This is one of my favorite scenes from last Friday night’s snowstorm. Quite a few people asked me how I was able to take photos without having snow and water droplets on my camera lens. It was quite a production actually. As I explained in my initial post, I wrapped my camera lens in plastic and then poked a hole in a plastic bag and threaded the lens through that hole. The rest of the plastic bag went over the camera as a covering. I secured the plastic with a lens hood which came in handy during periods of blowing snow. When I wasn’t taking a photo I would point the camera down lens to the ground so that when snow blew towards me, it would blow and collect on the outside of the lens hood keeping the lens relatively dry and clean. I also had a lens filter on the lens.

This meant that I only had a tiny amount of time to shoot each shot. I shoot in manual mode because it’s a long-standing preference of mine so I already had set up the settings that worked for the majority of shots (I did have to adjust a lot once I got to the Times Square area due to the lighting there). In the event that there was a shot I wanted to go for that was in the direction of blowing snow, I would just quickly take the shot and then scurry towards an awning, scaffolding cover, or dry entrance where I would wipe the lens down with a lens wipe.

I finally got around to putting some of the more popular photos from my winter storm Nemo in NYC set that I took and shared this past weekend during the (non) blizzard in my main portfolio and store. They are scattered throughout the rest of my photos. A number of people asked when I was going to put them up for sale so I have been slowly putting the photos from the set into my portfolio - store. I actually have more photos that I haven’t even touched from that night that I hope to go through in the next few weeks and eventually share.

I really didn’t expect the response I got for the photo set over on Flickr! Over the weekend, my Flickr was viewed 175,000 times and the winter storm Nemo photoset (in its entirety) has been viewed nearly 30,000 times (with each photo being viewed anywhere from 900 to over 4000 times). Over on G+, the main photo that I shared has been viewed 189,000 times. Craziness! Thanks all for all of the awesome messages, comments, shares and love for New York City in the snow :).

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New York City at night. St.Mark’s Place. East Village.

When the days concede to night in the winter, there is a certain comfort in the glow of neon city lights.

This particular view is of St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. The giant cow on the right belongs to the restaurant Mark (“We grind our own beef”) and the colorful neon signs belong to Andromeda - a tattoo and piercing establishment that merged with the West Village’s Cassioppia a few years back.

The sign that is partially concealed on the left under the tree branches (with shoes hanging off of them!) is Rockit Scientist Records which was a great records store that dated back to the mid 1990s when the East Village was home to far more records stores and had a more eclectic vibe.

There is a coldness to neon that is eclipsed by a peculiar sort of warmth when the windchill dips into the single digits. It’s a sign of life. People tend to huddle under the glow of the lights in the winter with a frequency that isn’t seen as much in warmer months as if they are city moths drawn to the glowing promise of warmth.

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Since people have asked, I am going to include the camera/lens combos I used for each photo on this blog from this point on (or at least I will try!). This was taken with the Sony a99 and my 35mm lens.

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Lower East Side at night. New York City.

At night, as the street lights guide urban wanderers home under a blanket of darkness,

the mist from the fog of millions of thoughts exhales at once into a sky heavy with dreams.

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This is a view looking down Rivington Street towards Suffolk Street on the Lower East Side in lower Manhattan. The building in the foreground with the colorful street art and graffiti is ABC No Rio, a center for art and activism that has been in this neighborhood since 1980.

This was taken with the Sony a99. It feels great to capture night scenes with this camera since it performs really well in low-light. During winter here in New York City, the nights seem endless so it’s nice to be able to capture what I experience and see on a daily basis after the sun goes down .

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Times Square. New York City.

Times Square is its own universe.

It’s New York City filtered through cinematic dreams and commercially-tinged aspirations wrapped up in flashing lights and colorful billboards. There is a familiarity to it that is tinged with a wild-eyed estranged quality that makes it all the more alluring.

And when a yellow New York City taxi cab drives by at the speed of light under all the flashing lights, it’s hard not to smile.

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Taken with a Sony a99 using the Miniature setting creative style. The Sony a99 has around twenty different creative styles and while I usually shoot in RAW format and do my editing after the fact, I have to say that the Miniature setting was just way too fun to play with especially in Times Square! The results are similar to a Tilt Shift Lens (or I suppose a Lens Baby as well) and you can adjust where you want the focus and blur to end up.

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New York City at night - Financial District street with a smoke stack.

At night after the multitudes have retreated to their homes away from the buildings and streets that hold them close during the day the city relaxes shaking the dust of the long day from its concrete limbs.

The street lights flicker like dream-heavy blinks of an eye while smokestacks exhale world-weary breaths of smoke into the yawning night air.

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Buckyball by Leo Villareal- Madison Square Park Art. New York City.

This is a large-scale work by light installation artist Leo Villareal called Buckyball that is on display in Madison Square Park until February 1, 2013.

The work’s two nested geodesic spheres are comprised of 180 LED-tubes arranged in a series of pentagons and hexagons that contain thousands of individual pixels capable of displaying 16 million distinct colors. Controlled by custom software designed by the artist, the 30 foot tall illuminated sculpture animates Madison Square Park’s natural landscape with dynamic, random light sequences of varied color, opacity, speed, and scale.

Zero-gravity couches, are placed at the base of the sculpture to allow viewers to gather and contemplate the artwork. The couches and sculptural aspects of the installation reference elements of the park and add a physical and temporal dimension to the viewer’s multisensory experience of Buckyball.

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I went for a little walk in the fog last night and ended up sitting on one of the zero-gravity couches in Madison Square Park (as mentioned above) and staring at this installation for quite a long time since it constantly changes. This installation is quite a sight to behold and is very mesmerizing. The fog was quite thick last night as well as you can see through the light next to the tower in the background which is the MetLife Tower. Not a bad way to spend a foggy evening in New York City!

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Lower East Side alley at night. New York City.

I was recently interviewed by the New York City independent press called “great weather for media”. They used the photo in this post for their upcoming anthology called: It’s Animal But Merciful.

The interview is now published on their site. It was the result of an interesting conversation that I had with editor, poet, performer and writer: George Wallace. Here it is:

Through the Lens. An Interview with NYC photographer Vivienne Gucwa

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The Chrysler Building and Grand Central Station. Midtown, Manhattan.

(Clicking through the photo will take you to where it is located on Flickr where you can see larger versions and/or more information.)

Empire State Building. Midtown, Manhattan.

I have always loved that sign. I know it’s supposed to indicate that the Empire State Building is up the block a bit but in my mind it also is informing people that they should look up (as if one could miss it!).

(Clicking through the photo will take you to where it is located on Flickr where you can see larger versions and/or more information.)