The Chrysler Building in New York is a favourite of mine, and a great subject for black and white photography. The metallic exterior, the sunburst on the crown and the metal eagles make it an architectural wonder for me.
The Chrysler is a reflection of both the Art Deco era and the machine age and has strong automotive accents. at 319 m, it was was briefly the world’s tallest building before that honour passed to the Empire State Building in 1931. It was the headquarters of the Chrysler Corporation from 1930 until the mid-1950s and is still the tallest brick building in the world, albeit with a steel frame, and the 5th tallest building in New York. The corners of the 61st floor are decorated with those fabulous metal eagles whilst replicas of the 1920s Chrysler bonnet ornaments (aka radiator caps) adorn the corners of the 31st floor.
I took the shot you can see here on a Nikon D300 with an 18-200mm lens at 112mm. It was shot from 42nd Street in New York City at ground level and the picture was taken in broad daylight, in the early afternoon. This statement sometimes results in disbelief, but at night what is most visible of the crown of the building is the triangular illuminated windows, so the building appears quite unlike my picture. A quick search on Google Images for ‘Chrysler Building at night’ will confirm the difference. The effect you can see here, which I refer to as ‘Darkness at Noon’ relies on a good quality circular polariser, the nature of the camera’s light meter, and an underexposure/red filter combination during mono coversion. Let me break this down step by step.
A circular polariser is an indispensible piece of kit that increases color saturation and decrease reflections. It is also one of the only lens filters the effect of which cannot be replicated by editing. Importantly, it can also darken skies, which is what I was using one for in this instance. I used a Hoya Pro-1, which does the job very well.
The second part of the equation is not a technique but a property of the camera, whose reflective light meter wants to average out every scene to middle grey. What this means in practice is that the brighter the subject (building) is, the darker the background (sky) will be. This is why the sky looks dark blue in many Mediterranean holiday photos – the white buildings darken the sky. I took a lot of shots of the Chrysler (around 50) and one in particular had a brighter building and a darker sky, as it had caught the sunlight particularly well at that moment. So, I took the best shot I had, in which the sky was already dark blue – helped along by the circular polariser – and did my raw editing in Aperture, adjusting the curves into a gentle ‘S’ shape to make the image more punchy.
From there I moved on to Photoshop, to perform the mono conversion. I use the Silver Efex Pro plugin, which is an amazing bit of software – it has a powerful set of options but also a rich variety of presets, which makes it easy to use. I selected the ‘underexpose’ preset and added the red filter, which together will turn a dark sky pitch black, and the image was complete: a silver building on a black background. Or perhaps, a silver building caught in a flash of darkness…
Old Havana is everything it is reputed to be and more. Travelling to the city from the airport on back roads, it felt like I had travelled into an era 50 years on from the apocalypse – with everything in a state of decay and recycling a major part of life. Old Havana, with its faded and crumbling colonial architecture and many ’50s American cars, is more of the same, and the feeling of being somewhere utterly different is reinforced by the suffocating heat, the noise and the slightly intimidating street life.
This is the oldest picture on this website and the beginning of my black and white photography journey.