Colors of the City / Broadway Lights
Cab Ride in the Rain, Radio City Music Hall, NYC 2009
Tonight Belongs to Phantom, NYC 2008
Don’t Let the Lights Go Out on Broadway, NYC 2012
As a photographer, even one whose first love is nature, I never could walk around the streets of Manhattan at night without a camera. The constant motion of the yellow cabs, the continuously changing mega screens in Times Square and even the lit billboards, create a canvas of possibiities to make a great image come to life. Cab Ride, shot from the back seat of a Yellow Cab as the CNN cast scrolled by, took several drives around the corner to get just what I was looking for.
Phantom was much easier to shoot as long as I avoided being run over by any one of the various forms of NYC’s transportation vehicles such as taxis, limos, or tricked out bicycle chariot/rickshaws.
Finally, being able to spread out tripod legs and use a long lens allowed me to capture an electrician repairing a single light amongst millions in the heart of Times Square. Timing the capture was critical to its composition because the images on the screens changed every few seconds. Clearly, this man’s job was to make sure… the lights don’t go out on Broadway (nod to Billy Joel).