About Photography: Manhattan sunset with the Fuji X-T1

Monday, June 9, 2014

Manhattan sunset with the Fuji X-T1

I ended my weekend of photographing New York with the new World Trade Center by taking a sunset cruise around the island. The sky, which had been sunny the whole day, became completely overcast just before we set sail. Fortunately, the sun broke through the cloud cover just at sunset and lit up the underside of the cloud cover with subtle, but defining color. Many of the glass skyscrapers glowed in the reflected light helping to define their shape in the otherwise overcast light.

The Fuji X-T1 was my camera of choice for this trip along with three lenses: the 18-55mm, 55-200mm, and 14mm f/2.8. I chose the prime 14mm over the 10-24mm zoom because it has an extra aperture stop of f/2.8 instead of f/4 and I knew I would be hand-holding the camera in fading light and would rather open up a stop than increase the ISO.

The sky colors were subtle. In a situation such as this I definitely want to work in 16-bit RAW and I move the image into the LAB color workspace in Photoshop to work on the colors. LAB is the most extensive non-destructive color space. After bringing out the colors, I transfer the image back to Adobe RGB.

This vista of the city from the Statue of Liberty is one of the most popular. Changing weather phenomena can make a commonplace scene special. To emphasize this unique sky I used the wide angle lens and positioned the city scene towards the bottom of the frame.

I switched to the Fuji 14mm wide angle lens to include a large part of the upper sky with its subtle, but colorful light.

I wanted to use the criss-cross contrail pattern as part of the composition so I darkened the blue area of the sky to add to their contrast.

When this bright red tug boat passed in front of the industrial pattern of the loading dock in the background it made a beautiful pattern of reds and blues that was hard to resist.