The right time of year for photographing New York

For the month of December into January the sun is at its lowest place in the southern sky and when it sets it lights up the facades of the buildings to the north of it. It is a great time to pick up dramatic shots of the city where the buildings are brightly lit against a darkening sky that also picks up a little color from the sunset.

For the shot below of the Empire State Building taken as the sun was setting, I used a Leica M 240 fit with a 50mm f/1.4 Summilux lens set to f/5.6 and took a sequence of five exposures starting at the bottom and tilting the camera up for each subsequent exposure. I later stitched the five images together using PTGui software. The result is an extremely high resolution image capable of enlargements at least 8' tall.

Many of the windows in the building are blasted out by the sun reflecting into them. To compensate I took an extra shot 3-stops under-exposed and used it to bring in the window detail later in post-processing.