Sunset silhouette
Many years ago (10 to be exact) I captured a shot of a man with his feet resting on his bicycle as he was admiring a simply stunning sunset over the Jersey City skyline about a half mile from here. You can find that shot near the beginning of this gallery. It was my first successful sundown attempt with my then new and very first DSLR camera. My good friend Ron had told me about the great scenes I would be capable of capturing all along the esplanade, and I've been indebted to him since, as I've captured many nice shots here over the years, including one or two of my all time favorites.
Today I came here not to get a shot like this one you see here, but to capture an image of the koi pond behind me as I faced the Jersey City skyline. A fabulous looking spot, many wedding photographers have had their wedding parties stand on the balcony overlooking it to get magical and memorable wedding shots, for it truly is a lovely locale.
I was drawn here today by a single white water lily. It stood out amongst the rest surrounding it for they had all already fallen off or they had just started budding. This group of lilies highlighted by my white princess was to be the focal anchor point, for a scene with ducks and goldfish swimming by. I came mid to late afternoon and waited for the sun to start sliding down towards that wonderful Jersey skyline and send lots of warm directional light down onto my subject, turning it into the lovely scene I envisioned. But this day the clouds did not wish to cooperate and almost totally blocked the sun.
So now without the warm directional late afternoon sunlight, the shots I captured all looked dull and flat. However my sojourn to this spot was not a total loss for my equipment, as it so often does, attracted the attention of someone passing by and we ended up having a lovely conversation that must have lasted at least and hour or more. (I took down her email address on my phone, which had her name as part of the address as so many of us do, figuring my Windows phone would save it as an unnamed contact, but alas it appears to only save unnamed contacts when their a phone number not an e-mail address. I hope I run into her again).
After our delightful chat ended I got up to take the other pictures I had hoped to get today, shots of the sailboats coming back home to dock at Yacht harbor, back-lit by a rich red sunset. But our conversation lasted so long that I would have had to already be there by now. Plus the late day light from the sun wasn't the brilliant deep red and rich blue I was hoping to catch the sailboats with. Still it was nice enough to walk around the rest of the esplanade and see what might do this light some justice. In fact it looked particularly good on this gentleman right in front of me as I tried to get up.
I had actually taken a few shots of him before during lulls while I was waiting for more ducks and goldfish to swim by, just to see what camera lens combo would capture the scene best, if he was still there when the sun started to set, and IF I liked the lighting it presented, and IF he was still holding a nice pose. Yes a lot of if's. But great street photography is often born of guesses and gut feelings as to what someone you've never met may or may not do in a future situation that you cannot predict.
Reaching into my bag I didn't bring a wide assortment of lenses, purposely travelling lighter than I do for most trips if people hunting is what I'm after, and the only combo that would do justice in my bag to this scene was my 90mm lens attached to my cropped sensor camera.
With almost no free operating room for me to walk around and compose the shot, the cropping was going to be tight. So tight in fact the framing was perfect left to right, from right where I was standing. So I had to make sure to take a perfectly level shot in this dim light. For if I had to straighten the image in post production, I'd totally ruin the composition because there was no spare part of the scene left for me to throw away in the leveling process, as leveling always cuts off part of your picture.
My final problem was born of age, my age specifically. I had to stand in an awkward position to get the shot. Sitting as I had while photographing test shots of him from the koi pond was too low an angle, for it took in too much foreground that was completely black in shadows, and the foreground would have been distracting even if it weren't. Plus it would have cut off too much of the beautiful sky.
Standing up put him too low in the scene. So I decided I'd have to bend at an uncomfortable height to get the best composition, which wouldn't have been that much of a problem normally, but sitting for so long at the side of the koi pond at my age got my back pretty darn stiff, so holding this position was a lot harder than it used to be. On the plus side when I got home and looked at the shot in my editor I knew that pain in my back was all worth it. I liked this shot just as much as the one of the cyclist I captured here a decade ago.
And I thought I was showing signs of age getting up from my knees from taking shots back then. I long for those days now. Well at least these days my equipment keeps getting better, even if my body necessarily isn't.
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