The sky was clear and blue last night when I took this photo of the Empire State Building framed by barren tree branches on Broadway.  Taken with the Nikon D800, 70-200mm f/4 zoom at 200mm and f/22.

A light snow began falling in the evening just as the lights came on along lower Fifth Avenue.  Everything conspired to make this scene beautiful -- the time of day, the new falling snow, the haze, the warm glow.  I don't think the aesthetic balance of this scene lasted for more that a few minutes.  Fortunately, I had the Sony RX100 with me and attempted to capture the warm glow that came from the building windows and permeated the avenue, harmonizing with the gold building turret and lights on top of the Empire State Building.

It was already getting dark so I had to boost the ISO to 1600.  This was all the more worrisome because I also diminished the image size by cropping it to a square.  I had to deal with the noise in post-production, but was able to achieve a very nice image that printed out at 16" x 16".  This little camera really is amazing.

The first time I did a photo like this was just over twenty years ago using my son, Daniel, as the model opening the door.  Yesterday when we recreated the shot in our studio, my sons, Christopher and Daniel, now photographers in their own right, helped me put together this set, which resulted in a new version of the original photo concept.

The front part of the set with door and wall were assembled in our daylight studio.  It is actually a simple set, consisting of the door, its frame, two 4'x8' foamcore panels to form the walls, and floor molding to finish it off.  The whole thing is supported by autopoles. We then lit an interior wall with a strobe that over-powered the daylight exposure and provided the bright light beaming through the open door.  Camera was a Nikon D4 equipped with the Nikon 24-70mm zoom.

This view of Manhattan was taken from our studio terrace at sunset yesterday evening.  It is composed of two images taken with the Nikon 70-200mm f/4 zoom lens and later combined in Photoshop.  The camera used was the Nikon D800 set to ISO 100 for maximum quality.

Leaving room for copy in a stock photo

When I took the blog photo of the key the other day, I also made some variations for stock photography that included copy space for a designer to use for placing type or a product.

Here are a few other images that illustrate this compositional technique.

The upper right of this image was intentionally left blank, lightened, and softened enough for placement of copy. When you allocate space specifically for copy placement, it is important to know if the copy will surprint (dark type color over lighter backgrount) or drop out (white or light type over darker background).  Here I anticipated the type dropping out.  Picture white type against the blue background.

Here the designer is presented with a blank tag where copy could be placed.

In horizontal photos it's often good to include a compositional variation with space off to the side for the designer to use.  In this composition the photo could also span a horizontal two-page magazine spread because the subject is substantially to the left and would not be cut off by landing in the gutter of the magazine.

The new world trade center is topping off and in the process of raising its spire to reach a final overall building height of 1776'.  Early yesterday the sun was glinting off the side of the building when I took this shot with a Fuji X-Pro1 and 18-55mm lens.

I visited a book binder yesterday where I saw these binding threads and strings sitting on a shelf.  The packed composition of muted earth tones reminded me of the still life paintings of Giorgio Morandi, one of my favorite artists.

Fortunately I had the Sony RX-100 camera with me and was able to grab this shot.