When life gives you lemons
Ever since my good friend Ron told me about Battery Park City a decade ago and how beautiful the landscaping there was, I have made numerous trips to capture the many gardens and other lovely spots of this riverside community on film. In the springtime many of the gardens there look absolutely gorgeous. On days when the weather was pleasant and I was headed home to the ferry terminal, if I was on the West side I'd often get off the subway train at Chambers cross over to Battery Park City and then walk the entire length of the park down to the ferry terminal. All that just so I could take in the sights. The views of the Jersey City skyline at sunset were often beyond stunning.
Doing this many times over the years provided me with a rich trove of inspirational ideas for future photographs at the park. One of the places I wanted to photograph at BPC the most were the vast tulip beds at the North Cove (vast for New York City that is, in Holland they'd just laugh). Four large beds planted in the spring, each year a different color, I had many ideas for photographing them, and the one I dreamt of the most was of photographing one or both of the front two beds in the late afternoon on a partly sunny day.
Of all the images I planned for this locale, that one would be the trickiest to pull off simply due to logistics. Even though Battery Park City is one of the easiest places in New York for me to get to from Staten Island, it’s no walk in the park getting here none the less (no pun intended). So given my many years of experience with lighting when it comes to photographing landscapes, I knew that not just any partly cloudy afternoon would do, and that I'd have to reject scads of them for not being of the right quality (too bright, too dull, too cloudy in the wrong spots... on and on).
Even the most experienced meteorologist could not tell you if the kind of sky I was looking for late in the day is what would actually be there at that time from studying their weather maps early in the morning. So a whole lot of trips here over and over was sure to be my fate if I was serious about adding this scene to my online gallery.
Now if I lived in the area and could bring my camera with me every day to and from work, then this shot would be inevitable. But coming from Staten island and sitting around for and hour or two waiting to see if the sky I needed actually developed, would get old in a hurry after the first couple of attempts. I could always just go for a shot of a clear sky instead and get my shot on the very first try, however that wouldn't actually be that good a work around because while the tulips themselves would look fabulous back lit by such strong sunlight, everything else in the shot would suffer.
So it was partly sunny or bust. My attempted solution was to swing by the flower bed any spring afternoon that I had my camera with me, was near the park and had the free time to make the detour. This did not work out that well, as it had been 9 years running and I've never had my camera with me on the right afternoon. The way this spring started out it looked like I would be adding a tenth year to it with no end in sight, but then fate intervened.
When Covid-19 first hit our shores and my store closed (quite abruptly) my manager called us into the office and told us we'd be back in about two weeks. But as the reports came pouring in from all sectors I soon realized this was going to last a whoooole lot longer, and I had better start stocking up on supplies to ride this out as the Mayor was admonishing us all to do. Unfortunately for me the rest of the city already saw this coming long before I did and wiped out every store remotely near me of everything I was looking for.
So despite me trying to follow our leaders suggestion to hunker down at home and ride this thing out, I still found myself spending an inordinate amount of time outside of mine, searching all over town for silly things like oh, milk, mayo, toilet paper, Clorox wipes.... Did not have a lot of luck for the first two or three weeks, but still I was just thankful I had enough money saved up in the bank to pay for whatever I needed while we all sat this pandemic out, if only I could find a store who's shelves weren't already wiped out.
Eventually things got so bad that I had to expand my search radius outside Staten island to include lower Manhattan all the way up through the village, where I finally got my hands on two loaves of bread.
Well as I was avoiding mass transit like the plague (probably not the best term to use during a pandemic, lol) I found myself doing an awful lot of walking around (This turned out to do wonders for my lower back and hips, which had been throbbing in pain from sitting around the house so much). All around me there were flowers springing up. This is definitely my favorite time of year and not surprisingly I got the urge to bring my camera with me and capture everything from bees butterflies and people, to sweeping scenics while I did my searching from store to store.
Now when it comes to fresh fruits and vegetables I hate the ones you buy in the supermarket and only buy mine at Whole Foods (or Trader Joe's). But there isn't a Whole foods in Staten Island. Or at least if there is it's all the way on the opposite end of the island. If I wanted to avoid spending endlessly long trips on mass transit during this pandemic I was going to have to do a lot of my searching for supplies on foot.
The closest Whole foods to me is the one in lower Manhattan on Chambers street. The quickest way to walk there is to go straight up Broadway. But from a scenic enjoyment point of view, making a left after leaving the ferry terminal, walking up through Battery Park, then traveling along the waters edge on the esplanade is an exponentially more enjoyable trip. Heaven knows I had the free time.
So I started walking the 25 minutes from my house to St. George, catching the ferry to the city , then walking the 45 minutes or so up BPC to the health food store. I found those days perfect to bring along my cropped sensor camera and my 18-400mm all purpose lens, as that compact combo lets you capture just about anything you want in one nice neat package (It's the combo I always take with me on vacations and cruises when I don't want to drag a ton of equipment with me, but still want to be able to photograph as many subjects as the tropic and resort settings tend to throw at you). And shoot I did, capturing all the spring colors week after week, especially in Battery Park City.
But those a fore mentioned tulip beds sadly were not among them, for the times I passed by to or from the store were never late in the afternoon when the sun was at the optimal position for the shot. Headed home one sunny day with my arms full of Whole Foods produce bags, the thought occurred to me that on the next bunch of partially sunny forecast days why not just bring my camera and patiently sit around for an hour or so and see what the sky develops into?
I thought about it for a moment and almost mumbled out loud “Why not”? What was the point of rushing to get home when most of the chores inside the house and out had been done. With the city shut down I had nothing but time on my hands after doing the days grocery shopping and supply scavenging. I'll never get a better chance to try and capture this scene then now I reasoned.
So on the next day that the weathermen forecast for a late afternoon sky which would suit my needs, and that I was willing to come into the city for, I packed my full framed camera and 24-70mm zoom lens and headed into Manhattan. I would not be able to capture the wide variety of shots that I had been doing with my other lens/camera combo, but for this one scene, this lens camera combination would knock my long sought after shot right out of the park.
I arrived at the North cove, camera in tow with over an hour to spare, so I sat down by the steps and people watched at first. But being this close to the water in mid April it was quite chilly and soon buried my chin into my chest, with my hands in my pockets to keep warm. Wearing my scarf and gloves to protect myself because of the pandemic, also helped me keep warm while I waited.
I pulled my head up out of my chest every 10 minutes or so to check on the changing lighting conditions, and when I saw the sun slide below and past the Citibank office tower on the left and that the sun and cloud cover still looked exceptionally good, my creative juices started flowing excitedly. Was I actually going get the sky I was looking for on my very first planned trip here after nearly a decade of futility with my hope and get lucky method? Looks like it, and I got off my duff and quickly walked up the steps to the tulip beds, then composed my shot. When the sun slid down between the two towers in the middle and a perfectly placed cloud helped soften the sun, I pressed my camera trigger. Success at last!!
I had assumed such a high dynamic range cityscape scene would require me to capture it in a sequence of shots across a wide range of exposures (something I haven't had to do once since acquiring my D810, Nikon’s finest landscape camera at the time, three years ago), then blend them all together in Photoshop. But when I sat down in front of my computer and looked at all my images, this one taken to expose for some of the more delicate colors in the sky, looked pretty much how I wanted the entire scene to look after I blended all the shots together. Seeing that I just edited this one shot alone. No having to hassle with my software trying to get all the tree branches moving in the breeze to line up in each shot ( Several times I've told my camera friends that if the D810 were a woman I'd marry it).
Looking at the shot on my 30 inch monitor when I finished, the image looked just the way I had always hoped it would when I admired the scene live all these many years. So at last after a decade the shot I wanted to capture most at Battery Park was finally in my gallery. Getting furloughed from my job for 2 months was surely no picnic, but when life gives you lemons....
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