The capital of New York is situated here in Albany. I traveled thru the city looking for a digital Image to capture and the roadways led me to the west side of the capital. I had not been over here for a real long time and this was the first time on an overcast fall day. For the most part, I’m traveling around getting myself prepared for some of the shooting trips I have coming up. I was looking for a good opportunity to use the 85mm PC-e.
When I saw this cityscape with a landscape foreground, I knew that the 85mm Pc-e would be the lens for the job. How did I know ? I call the 85mm lens, the hug me lens, that’s because if you hold both your arms straight out from your shoulder, like a hug, then that is your field of view (FOV) for an 85mm Image. I use this FOV as my point of reference when I’m selecting a lens for a particular shot. An 85mm is a funky lens length, not really a telephoto, yet it gets you close sometimes and then not close enough at other times. Some people like to use it for portraits, the 85mm f/1.4D was known as the cream machine for a wonderful depth of field rendering. Yet others like the 105mm, some the 200mm. I think the regular 85mm is a great all around shooting lens, it was one of my first lens that I learned to shoot with.
The reason for the PC-E ? Well on this shoot, when I say this architecture formation I began thinking of similarities with mesa’s of Moab. I have a huge tombstone and a small mesa here. I am elevated on the hillside at Lincoln Park, everything had to be level and square, but the lens was still focused at shooting about four inches low. If I tilted my tripod head up then I would introduce distortion. So I engaged the shift feature, this allowed me to move the lens two inches upward, so now I could take the Image without any perspective distortion or keystoning. It’s architecturally accurate at point of capture.
PC-E Micro Nikkor 85MM
Cityscapes are a little more technically challenging, as you often are trying to control perspective and skewing. Even in the digital darkroom it has taken about five hours to blend a few images, correct a number of different color casts and then get the colors, greys, whites, blues and clouds so that your eye follows thru the Image the way that I envision at point of capture. A new tool for the plugin arsenal is NIK Color effects pro V4, Detail Extractor. Very, very nice….
Lincoln Park has quite a bit of history, dating back to when the Dutch owned the area in the mid 160o’s. The area has the foundation of an old river basin carved by a now defunct river which flowed into the nearby Hudson. In 1625, it was the site of a Dutch and Mohawk ambush at Fort Orange. The clay from the banks of the basin and the river helped industrialize the area with a number of brick factory and breweries.
What I found interesting is that from this vantage point the city looks ruralesque nesteled in the autumn trees. When you move to the eastern side of the these buildings, the grand malls which they are part of, does not have this lush park-like setting.
