Changing weather changes everything

As I've mentioned previously on this blog, combining a unique weather phenomena with a travel or landscape image can take it from the ordinary to the dramatic, and make an ordinary subject your own. Weather is constantly changing. Even a few seconds can demand a change to an alternate composition.

Case in point are these two photos, one taken yesterday evening, the other this morning of the ubiquitous NYC subject, the Empire State Building. Both were taken with my Fuji X-T1 and 18-135mm lens because that is a combo I always have with me on the ready for a quick grab, and both of these images required a quick grab. A few seconds and the composition of light and dark in each situation was gone.

This image is for my portfolio of platinum prints. I saw the bright break in the overcast sky approaching the tower of the Empire State Building and quickly more to a position where the bright part would intersect with the tower to silhouette it. Total time to see, prepare, and shoot this photo was no more than about five seconds. After that it was all over. 

This morning view of puffy clouds against a deep blue sky reminded me of mid-twentieth century film photography where photographers used deep yellow or red filters to punch the blues and gain maximum contrast and drama in the sky -- seemed to render a nostalgic look to the Art Deco design of the Empire State Building.  

Last night I gave a presentation to the NYC Sierra Club Photography Committee discussing this very topic of how nature interfaces with the city in the form of weather patterns that are constantly providing us with new, and interesting opportunities to capture our own unique experiences of ever-changing scenes. On the way home from that presentation the theme of my discussion came home to me in the scene below captured with my cell phone. It shows the evening drizzle and mist sponging up light from the Empire State Building and silhouetting the branches of a foreground tree -- nature providing another unique view in a constantly evolving landscape.