Lightning storm over Manhattan

For the past week or so we've been treated to late afternoon and evening thunderstorms with dramatic cloud formations often accompanied by lightning strikes. Last night we had a dry storm with lightning. I set up my X-Pro2 on a tripod to try to capture some of the strikes. With an aperture of f/11 and ISO 200 (This is when I wish Fuji had a lower 100 as the base ISO.) I ended up with a shutter speed of 4 seconds. When photographing lightning you need to keep snapping away with a slow shutter speed. In this case, I was using a 4 second exposure. I usually time my exposures by waiting several seconds after a strike and then opening the shutter for a time exposure. Then you've got to be lucky.

One thing leads to another

One of my favorite things in photography is stumbling into something I hadn't expected to do. This morning, while on a bike ride to lower Manhattan, I came across a scene with buildings juxtaposed against an interesting, milky sky. I had my X-Pro2 with me with the 18-135mm zoom and grabbed some abstract compositions of building patterns. Some I wanted for their own sake, while I intended to use others as combination images for my Metropolis project, or to combine with some model shots to create conceptual multiple exposures.

Below are a few of the single images I took followed by one I used to create a conceptual multiple exposure.

Sunset and storm clouds over the Hudson River

With the heat wave in New York, we've been getting hit by daily late afternoon thunderstorms, which often makes for some beautiful cloud formations, especially when they occur around sunset, as they did last night. I was on a boat in the Hudson River when the storm passed through to the north of us. I had my Fuji X-Pro2 and the ubiquitous 18-135mm lens, the lens I usually take when I only want to carry one and don't have any specific plans for photography.

My 18mm lens wasn't wide enough to capture this entire sky so I panned the camera and took four horizontal photos, which I later combined using PTGui.. 

This long horizontal is stitched from three horizontal photos. A tiny jet plane is off to the left on its final approach to Newark Airport.

Blur motion shot of the Hudson River as the setting sun broke through the storm clouds.

Raindrops falling on the churning water of the Hudson River. 

Hudson Valley, Part II - The Primeval Forest

This is my second interpretation of the dense woodland forests of the Hudson Valley. All images were taken with the Fuji X-Pro2 and 14mm f/2.8 lens. Images were processed as Acros with a green filter and later given my platinum treatment in Photoshop.

The Hudson Valley with a Fuji X-Pro2 and 14mm lens

This past weekend I was visiting a friend who has a home surrounded by forest in the Hudson Valley. For me this is the perfect equation to do some nature photography. I had several camera systems with me to do stills, videos, and even 360º virtual reality panoramas. Here are some of color impressions I did of the surrounding forests at sunset with the Fuji 14mm f/2.8 lens on an X-Pro2. The blurs were done in camera with a low shutter speed.

In my next post I will show some of the monochrome interpretations I did of the same area.

MA - the Japanese concept of negative space

By now the Japanese term, "bokeh", representing quality of the area of a photograph that is out of focus, but how many of us are aware of the Japanese concept of "Ma" referring to the area of space between things. Ma, like bokeh, gives meaning to the concept of space as a substance. Ma isn't a line separating things. It is more a void between things. It has its own substance, much like bokeh does.

Ma is the silence between musical notes that gives pause and meaning to the notes themselves.

Ma is at the core of Minimalism, and, if you've been following this blog for any time, you know I am a Minimalist at heart.

Before I was a photographer, I was a painter. One exercise we performed in painting classes was to paint the surrounding area of the subject before us, as opposed to painting the subject itself. This taught us a lot about composition. I think of Matisse while I write this. Matisse was an artist whose compositions were built more around the space, the "Ma", than around the subject.

In our western culture space is often defined by walls, very solid walls. In japan these same separation may only be the very delicate, and even semi-transparent, shoji screens made of paper. The division is less important than the space divided. In the photos below the space surrounding the forms infuses the subjects with meaning in space/time as a result of their reverence to the space itself.

Photographing in colorful Times Square with the Fuji X-Pro2

Last night I went to Times Square at dusk to test out the Ricoh Theta S 360º panoramic camera. I wasn't prepared for the swarm of summer tourists who invaded the space with cell phone cameras blazing away, squeezing off selfies from every conceivable angle. Documentary photography is not something I do very often. I had my Fuji X-Pro2 with me along with the Fuji 16-55mm f/2.8 lens and decided to do a mini-documentary of the frenzied photography scene in the square. I kept the lens set to its widest 16mm almost the whole time.

I simply left the X-Pro2 on auto ISO and auto exposure because I knew it would easily handle this scene, plus I wanted to be able to shoot very quickly to take advantage of impromptu moments. Times Square at night is much brighter than you might realize. My auto-ISO was fluctuating all over the place from 320-4000, but stayed mostly around 640.

I processed the RAW images using both the Vivid and Provia color modes from Adobe camera RAW. I needed the RAW images to bring in the blasted out highlights of the brightly lit signs as I shot for the mid-tones. When photographing in Times Square it is best to start shooting earlier than sunset to balance out the lights with the natural light. I began my project rather late, just after sunset and paid for it with the blasted out highlights.

Below is a sampling of the essay in all its colorful glory.