- Hello and welcome to
the i3 Lecture Series,
hosted by the master's in
Digital Photography program
at the School of Digital Arts.
We're thrilled to have
photographer and editor
Gary Hershorn as tonight's guest speaker.
Gary's career began in 1979 working
for the United Press
International in Canada.
Six years later, he was hired by Reuters.
During his 29 year career at Reuters,
Gary worked as a photographer
in Toronto and Washington DC
and as picture editor for the Americas
and later Global Sports pictures editor.
As a photographer, he has
covered 17 Olympic games,
24 Masters Golf Tournaments,
an equal number of Academy Awards,
along with numerous major
news events around the world.
At present, Gary is the
photo editor for foxnews.com.
He is also a contributing
photographer at Getty Images
and continues to work on an
ongoing, personal project
documenting the changing
skyline of New York City.
Please help me welcome Gary
Hershorn to our lecture series.
(audience applauds)
- One of the things that
I always tell people
when they see these pictures
that none of them are random.
Every picture you see is basically plotted
on this little map and this
graph and you can follow
the lines and see when the
sun rises or the moon rises
or the moon sets so you
can absolutely figure out
where you have to go and by using the app,
you can also shorten the
amount of time you spend
actually photographing, so
if you're doing a moonrise,
you can go out and do it in five minutes
and on a cold winter day,
that's a really helpful thing,
you know, you don't want
to be out there too long
when it's minus 40, you
know, out there, so.
I do live in Hoboken, I've
been in the New York area now
since 2005, I came to New
York for the first time
in the '70s, I think it
was 1978, my first trip
to New York City, I was 20 years old
and I fell in love with
this city like there was
no other city in the world.
I knew right then when I started there
or when I came here the first time
that I wanted to live here someday.
I just didn't know it
was gonna take from 1978
to 2005 to accomplish that.
We were talking about me being in DC.
I went to DC for three years,
ended up staying for 15.
It was like
14 years, 364 days too long.
It was just a horrible
boring city back in the '90s.
It was good, I was working for Reuters.
I spent a lot of time
photographing Bill Clinton
back in the '90s for eight
years and it was interesting
doing that, but most of my time was spent
being a sports photographer,
running around the world
with Brad Smith back there.
With Brad, who was at Sports Illustrated,
so what I'm gonna do is,
how many here are born
and raised in New York?
A lot, yeah, and all the others here?
You hope to stay here for a long time?
It is the greatest place
in the world, right?
I'm gonna show you 10 quick
pictures of my previous life,
five news, five sports,
I'm gonna then show you
some pictures and get into
where I got the inspiration
of starting this were on New York City
and it's been an ongoing
project that started for me
in the summer of 2011
and I was very big in the news business
and I think, in general,
it was a really big summer
because it was the time leading
up to the 10th anniversary
of 9/11 and the world
focused their eyes a lot
on New York City.
For those of us who were working
at Reuters or AP or Getty,
the appetite for pictures
of New York to be published
around the world was
huge, absolutely huge,
but we'll get into that in a little bit,
so if you have any questions,
during, don't hesitate,
shout 'em out if you need to.
If you see something and you
wanna ask a question about it.
So like I say, Washington,
this goes back to the '80s,
Reagan and Gorbachev, when the,
after the Berlin Wall fell and
Russia went more democratic.
This was a picture I was very proud of.
This was John John, John Kennedy
at his mom's funeral, Jackie O,
sorry, at his mom's burial
in Arlington Cemetery
and I was really proud about this picture
and it played all over the
world on the front pages
because John John had
never been photographed
at his father's grave before.
Whenever he went on the
anniversary, he never went
on the day of his father's death
so that he couldn't be photographed
and we were there with
the White House pool.
Three photographers, one
from AP, one from AFP,
one from Reuters and
I was waiting for this moment.
I just had it in my head,
this moment was gonna happen.
He was gonna touch his father's,
he was gonna do something
with his father's gravestone
and sure enough, he walked over to it
and he just swiped his
hand on it and walked away
and the luckiness that I had that day
was the AP photographer was
out of focus on this picture
and the AFP photographer ran out of film.
Back then it was only film, not digital,
36 pictures and nothing was worse
than when you're pushing the
button and click, nothing.
So I had like a world exclusive on that
and was really happy to
have had that picture.
Another big moment at the White House
when Arafat and Ramin shook hands.
There's a big moment.
As a photographer, you
know, you're always looking
for something different,
you wanna do something that
stands out, right?
This is Obama's election
in November of 2008.
We were allowed to set up cameras,
there was a wall here and we were allowed
to put cameras at the top of the wall.
I was thinking that,
I remembered back in August of that year
when they had the convention in Denver,
this was the kind of
lighting that they lit the
stage for Obama to walk out on the night
that he gave his speech,
you know, Thursday night,
the candidate gives their
speech and so in Denver,
he was in a big stadium, he walked out
and they had all this
spotlighting creating the shadow
so I had no idea that they
were gonna do that again
but I assumed they would do it
and I used a wide angle lens
to try and get the shadow and
it worked out quite nicely
and most of the other
photographers had long lenses
zoomed in on the podium where
he was gonna give his speech
so that at the end of his speech
they would have him waving
and the people and one
of the other reasons
I did the wide angle lens is that's me.
Right there. (laughs)
I wanted to be in the
picture, so we were using
radio remotes to trigger the cameras and
that was a great historical moment.
And some of you may have
remembered this event
here in New York.
That was shot out my window at Reuters
from the 19th floor of Reuters
at Seventh and 42nd street.
It just so happens that the
plane floated between buildings
and we could see it from our office and
we were the only ones that had
a picture like that, Reuters,
for like eight hours before somebody else
who had a picture surfaced with it.
It's also a very
memorable, this is actually
a very memorable moment
because it was like around 2010,
the iPhone had just come out
and the first time, you know,
you talk about citizen journalism,
there was a person on the ferry
who took a picture out the
window of the ferry that
they put on Twitter that
was used all over the world
in the real first explosion of
a citizen journalism moment.
And a bunch of happy people
back on Inauguration Day in.
(audience laughs)
In Washington, they were just thrilled.
It was a happy day.
So going back to sports,
this was the World Cup,
Maradona, one of the
greatest soccer players ever,
winning the World Cup in Mexico in '86.
Had to put the New York
Rangers, last Stanley Cup
and probably the only Stanley Cup
they're ever gonna win
again, right, Brad? (laughs)
Usain Bolt winning the
100 meters in Beijing.
Michael Phelps saying goodbye in Rio
after his final Olympic race.
So here we go, New York City, 1978,
there I am with my sister on the top
of the World Trade Center.
It was a mesmerizing view,
it was an incredible place to be.
New York City was a lot different then
than is now, I don't know,
what would we do if that was the subway?
How would we feel about
that in today's world?
Times Square had basically the same feel.
It's not a whole lot different now.
There's just more signs,
more visual pollution,
but it was pretty massive there.
That was from the Empire State Building
looking south to lower Manhattan.
And that's looking north
from the observation deck
at the World Trade Center.
So I was talking about the summer of 2011.
That was where I got all
my creative juices flowing
and I was not a creative photographer,
I was not a feature photographer,
I was a hardcore news
and sports photographer.
I didn't look for light,
I didn't try to do
anything beyond showing up
at an event, seeing what the light was,
working within the confines of that light.
Usually it was a stadium or maybe it was
an indoor stadium or indoor venue
and there's lights like
this that you would have
to work in, but in the summer of 2011,
the world's attention was on New York City
and everybody wanted to see
how New York was adapting
10 years after the fact of the attacks.
And
for anybody who lived
here through 2001 to 2011
I think you probably remember how
dormant the city was.
There was no construction going on.
It was in the summer of 2011
that One World Trade Center
actually started to come out of the ground
and we started to see a
rebirth of lower Manhattan.
Like I say, the world's
attention was very much
focused on New York City
and every photographer
working for every newspaper
and wire service was
trying to figure out a way
to show New York off in a different way
and this was the, 2011,
you know, cellphones
were just kinda starting,
there were apps like Hipstomatic,
anybody use Hipstomatic?
It was that app on an iPhone
that made your pictures green
but everybody thought it was cool.
It was the first filtering
done on a digital file
and people were using
Holgas and Lens Babies
and Widelux cameras and anything.
I chose to use a mobile
phone with most of the stuff
that I shot was
a Polaroid frame around it and
what I noticed about
my walking up and down the Hudson River
on the Jersey side
was how many people just
stared at lower Manhattan.
It was eerie in that summer, you know.
People like this gentleman,
they were just watching.
I can't imagine what they were thinking.
I didn't wanna, one
thing you'll see, sorry,
in my pictures is that there's
really no recognizable faces.
I don't like to have, I like
to have people in my pictures
but I don't like to see their face.
I want the city to be what you look at,
not a person's face.
Other people do street
photography and they show the
characters of New York City
and I just try to use people
for scale and perspective and
usually from behind like that.
I don't want to see their
face but I'm wondering,
what are they thinking of?
They're looking at ground zero,
they're looking at Lower Manhattan
and to me Lower Manhattan looks flat.
Without those tall
buildings, I'm just amazed,
a few short years ago,
to me it just feels low.
Another view.
See again, more people just,
a guy walking with his baby
and he just stops and stares.
It was the thing that
happened in that summer.
And this was also the year they lit
the World Trade Center
in red white and blue
when they had the tribute
in light that night.
So the next thing that
I can talk about is
the moon.
For anybody who follows my Instagram feed,
you'll know that I do a
lot of what you could call
celestial events over New York.
The sunrise, moonrise,
moonsets, things like that,
so this was something called a supermoon.
We've all heard that term now, right?
It's like the buzzword of the month,
and guess what, on March 20th next week,
there's another supermoon.
Does anybody know what
a supermoon actually is?
Supermoon for real happens like
every year and a half or so
and it is
referred to the orbit the
moon makes around the earth
at the closest point it
can ever come to the earth.
Which is 221 thousand miles away.
So this was a true supermoon
and it's funny, this was in May of 2012.
And I had never heard the
term supermoon before.
I don't know why this, maybe,
it was like the first supermoon
in like almost two years
to rise and
it was something that
I had to go photograph.
It's a supermoon, you gotta go look at it
so this picture was shot from a place
called Eagle Rock Reservation.
It's out in South Orange,
kinda like near Mount Claire
if you know where that is,
it's 13 miles from the city
and there's this incredible vista there.
It's a park and you can stand there
and you can see Manhattan
from lower Manhattan
all the way to the Bronx and
you have this great vista and
the moon, I knew using the apps,
I knew the moon was, even
then the apps were available
back then, I knew the moon was gonna rise
behind lower Manhattan, so
when it came up like that,
it was like that wow moment,
it was that thing that said
I gotta do this, so
unfortunately I became obsessed
and I do it every month.
I go chase a full moon every single month
and like I say the next one
is next Wednesday night,
March 20th is the next full moon
because there are
one full moon a month, you
get 12 shots at the full moon
in New York or anywhere and you
can count on at least
four of them being cloudy
so you really don't have
that many attempts at it
and you really only get one day a month
where the light is perfect
to photograph the moon rising
and I'm a not a big fan of
the moon against a black sky.
I kinda like the moon,
the day before a full moon
is usually the nicest time to go look
because when the moon comes up,
you can photograph it higher
and keep the ambient light in the sky
and the tone in the moon
rather than having a white dot
against the sky.
So what I'm gonna show
you tonight is basically
one year's work, I'm not a
photographer who likes to
live on his laurels and
say oh, this is from 1999,
this is from 2002, what I like to do
to inspire people is
this is what's been available
in New York for the last year
and every year is the same.
There's a lot of repetition
when you're photographing
a city like New York.
You go out over and over and over again
to the same places
to photograph, whether it's a moon
or just a sunset or whatever
'cause you never know
what the light's gonna be.
Every single morning, every single night,
the color of the light is different.
And the moon is in a different
place every full moon
when it comes up and it is,
I don't just restrict myself
to doing the full moon.
The moon comes up every day.
Every day the moon comes up
45 minutes later every day.
There's just a week where it
comes up leading into sunset
and the full moon always rises
in conjunction with the sun going down.
They're always timed at
the same time, basically.
So you'll see what I've
done in the last year, snow,
there's no city more beautiful
in snow than New York City.
It's magical for about
six hours and then it all turns brown
and it's just the ugliest
messiest thing ever, right?
So this is Fifth Avenue.
Well, heard of Manhattan henge?
Anybody photographed Manhattan henge here?
Go out there for sunset,
has anybody done sunrise Manhattan henge?
Anybody realize, yeah?
Anybody realize there is an
actual sunrise Manhattan henge?
This is from near where
Catrin lives in Weehawken and
this was, we get, like you get
sunset Manhattan henge for two days in May
and two days in July, you
get sunrise Manhattan henge
two days at the end of November
and two days in mid January.
So this one was in mid January last year
and it's 42nd street and it's
quite a beautiful picture.
This is from Weehawken, New Jersey
and the beautiful thing about Weehawken is
you could either go down
to the river like this
or you can go up,
there's a cliff, pardon?
King's Bluff, yeah, and you
can go up to King's Bluff.
And you can stand in exactly
the same spot but up high
and get a completely different
view which I'll show you
a little later.
Statue of Liberty, number
one icon in New York,
without a doubt by a long shot
and when you do pictures
of the Statue of Liberty
and you put 'em on social
media, she gets more likes
than any other icon
and the beautiful thing
about our city is there are no
other cities in the world
that have as many
recognizable iconic landmarks
and one of the things when
you do urban photography
or urban landscapes, it's always important
to have one of the icons in your picture
so that it is instantly
recognizable as New York City
and I try to focus on
the statue, One World Trade Center,
lower Manhattan has the
skyline and the shape
is very iconic and recognizable.
Empire State Building.
Chrysler Building, the
buildings along Times Square
and now we have Hudson Yards, you know,
on the West Side at the end of 30th street
and you go up to 34th Street.
It's an iconic shape that
has been added to the skyline
and now we also have billionaire's row,
all those horrible ugly
buildings along 57th Street
that are casting these long
shadows into Central Park
and dominating the
skyline of New York City.
So you'll see a lot of moonrises.
This is from the South Street Seaport,
three bridges, right, you've
go the Williamsburg bridge,
you've got the Manhattan bridge
and you've got the Brooklyn bridge
and it's just again
knowing, reading the app
and knowing exactly on
the app where to stand
to get the moon coming up.
I wanted to get up between
the two bridges at the top
but it was cloudy and it
disappeared into the clouds, so.
It doesn't, and again, it
doesn't line up that much.
You have to keep your eye on the app
and keep looking every
month to see and plan out
where you might want,
where you need to stand
or what month this might
actually happen again, so.
That's
taken up around Edgewater,
little north of Weehawken
and there's a lot of reflective light.
The beautiful thing on
the Jersey side is you get
a lot of reflective light
off of the glass buildings
along the skyline.
I live in Hoboken so
it's really simple for me
to go up and down the river,
up and down the Hudson River.
I joke a lot with people, friends of mine,
photographer friends who live in Brooklyn
and all the photographers
live in Brooklyn, right?
It's the cool place to live, they tell me,
but I live in Hoboken, I live in Jersey.
I think we have a better
view of the skyline in
Jersey than from Brooklyn and Queens.
I think there's too much
building that has gone on
along the East River
that has put up walls of
buildings in front of
the Empire State Building
or the World Trade Center, you know,
we have places where we can
see the World Trade Center
from top to bottom in Jersey City
and you can't do that in Brooklyn.
The other really big advantage
about being on the Jersey side
is I can drive up and down the coast,
up and down the river, from
George Washington Bridge
in the north to Bayonne in the South
and find free parking in
every spot that I want
to take a picture from and
it makes a huge difference
if you can drive to where you want to take
those pictures from and
there's about 16 spots
with fantastic vistas and vantage points
to photograph the city.
So this is fog, fog is my
favorite kind of weather
to photograph in, the
clock towers in Hoboken,
the Empire State Building,
it's about a mile across the river,
mile and a half and it's nice
to just put them together.
More fog, this always
happens once a spring,
where you get like a 70 degree
day and the Hudson River
in the winter and the
Hudson River is still cold
and all the steam rises up off the river
so keep your eye out for that.
If you ever see a spike
in the temperature,
like I say, none of this is random,
it's not like oh jeez,
I went out to the river
and found fog, you know,
it was like this was
a 65 degree day
and it's like gotta go
to the river, you know?
The other trick I'll give
you or the other trick
I'll tell you is Earth Cam.
They have an app and I
use Earth Cam religiously.
They have an app and for $5 you get access
to every Earth Cam there is.
So there's a camera in Jersey City,
two cameras in Jersey City that look at
World Trade Center
and then there's one that is
near the World Trade Center
that looks out on the New York Harbor,
so I can sit in bed before
a sunrise and I can wake up
and I can go to my Earth Cam
and I can see what
the weather's, I can see if there's clouds
or if it's clear and I can make a decision
about whether or not I'm going to go out
and photograph that morning.
All the tricks, there's a lot of tricks,
there's a lot of technology out there
that you can use to make your life easier
as a photographer when
you're photographing a city.
So we can go through this.
This is just after the
sun goes down, blue hour
in New York City, it's
from the observation deck
at World Trade Center,
that's the view from
lower Manhattan to the north.
Again, the reflective light happens.
This is in Hoboken, this kind of light
where the sun flares off
of the World Trade Center
will happen for about four
days and then the sun is
not gonna hit the building in the same way
so one of the things to keep in mind is
these opportunities to get
this kind of thing come and go
in days, not like weeks,
it's a very, very short period of time
and a very specific month and that's,
the one thing that I have not
figured out is how to plan
for getting the flares, you know,
it's just something
that happens to be there
when you're going out a lot.
Sometimes like the plane in the river,
you just look out your office
window and there's a picture
out there on the street.
Hudson Yards, so anybody
like this development?
It's opening on Friday,
well, the mall is opening
on Friday, so with Hudson
Yards, this gray building here
that connects these two buildings,
that's the sixth floor mall,
it opens sometime Friday.
Anybody planning to go here to the vessel?
The staircase?
It's opening,
well, it opens on Friday
also, but I don't think
the public can go Friday, Saturday, Sunday
so I have a ticket to climb
it on Monday afternoon
at sunset, so you have to book a ticket
if you want to climb this.
16 floors of staircases to
get a good workout with.
Lot of cruise ships.
The worst thing that's happening
with all this development
in New York City is we're
losing classic views
of iconic buildings.
Standing in this spot you
used to be able to see
the Empire State Building
and now it's gone
from that angle and it's
happening all over the city.
We're losing views left, right, and center
and they say it's progress.
The developers say it's
making New York more majestic
but it's taking away
pictures that have been shot
for 100 years and I find that
really sad to think about.
One of my pet peeves is I hate railings.
When you walk along the river,
whether it's the East River
or the Hudson River,
there's walkways forever
but they all have railings
but on the Jersey side,
there are two or three places you can go
where you can walk right
into the Hudson River.
From a park and I love being
able to get down low and
a ferry goes by, splashes the water
and it's out there at sunset.
Again, this one, this
is in Jersey City down
at the far end of Jersey
City in Paul's Hook.
This is in Hoboken where
we have a little beach
in Hoboken where they
launch kayaks and canoes
and things like that.
The moon and the Statue of Liberty.
It's an unbeatable combination.
Every time, you can't get it every month,
maybe six out of 12 months
the moon, when it rises,
lines up with the Statue of Liberty.
Two different nights, again, to show you,
this is the moon rising right at sunset.
And from sort of the same place
but a little farther back.
This is the mon a couple nights
later rising in the dark.
It's not quite full here and
you can see the difference.
And here you get a
brighter moon but you get
a little detail in it
and you got all the sky
and it's very nice
and a few nights later you're
focusing just on the moon
and the light of the moon
being orange when it rises.
The lower the moon is on the skyline,
the brighter orange it's gonna be.
The question is is I
have a lot of information
and whether or not I'm keeping a journal
so that I can refer back to the journal
to decide where, maybe, a year later to go
to the same spot, I don't
do that because the moon
never rises in the same
place like June to June,
for example, the moon is on
a 28 day elliptical orbit,
so over the course of the
year or a year and a half
it's not, there's not an
equivalency to if it rises here
in June of 2018, it's gonna
rise here in June 2019.
It may rise there, so
the journal's not really,
it might help with maybe
the flares off of buildings,
it might put you in the vicinity
of the week or the timeframe,
but it's too much work.
(audience laughs)
It's like one of the
biggest jokes that I have
on my Instagram feed is
everybody uses the hashtag
does Gary ever sleep because
I go out for sunrise,
I go out for sunset, and stuff like that
but I always remind people
that the sun sets in the winter
around 4:15, I don't go to
sleep at 4:39 or four o'clock,
you know, and in the winter,
the sun rises like at seven,
7:15, like it is right now
with the time change and
so there's a lot of time
between four and seven to sleep, so.
It's pretty simple.
Again, this is Weehawken,
it's one of my favorites.
Hamilton Park in Weehawken,
it's one of my favorite places
to photograph, we're back
in the fog and the rain.
I love the perspective of standing back
with a telephoto lens
capturing somebody in front
of the skyline, I like to
make people equal in size,
in many cases, or bigger
than the actual buildings
in the skyline, have a little fun
with playing with perspective and
a different look.
We all are chasing golden sunset.
This was for the Chrysler
Building which was just sold
last week for a paltry $150 million.
I didn't think, lot of people didn't think
it was gonna sell at all.
The people that owned it
bought it for $800 million
many years ago and they took a bath on it,
selling it for 150 million,
just something I like to say.
The deal closed last week
and the reason that it
sold for so little is
the building can't be modernized.
There's a number of reasons.
One is the
owners of the building do not own the land
that the building sits on.
The land that the building is on
is owned by Cooper Union.
And Cooper Union just raised the rent
to like $30 million a year
and in another five years it's
going to 42 or $45 million
a year, so that in itself
kept people from wanting
to buy the building and
the other problem is
they can't modernize the building.
There's a lot of pillars inside,
the office space is small, but it sold,
thankfully it sold and
somebody will maintain it.
It is truly maybe the most
beautiful building in New York.
Again reflective light,
just silhouette somebody,
put them in that light and
get it, a sense of the vista.
Again, Weehawken and it's
always fun to have people.
Oop, they were kissing,
you know, not planned,
just something that you
capture when you're out there.
I do a lot of low level photography,
put the camera on the
ground, put it in the grass.
Try something, one of the
reasons that I can put it,
one of the reasons I'll put it down low
is it cleans up all the other buildings.
You can just see the tops of
some of these other buildings
and if you put it down low enough,
you can clean out all the low buildings
and just have the highest one and give it,
make sure that the Empire State Building
stands out a little more.
This is a full moon rise
from the west side highway
on 42nd Street.
Normally I would shoot that from Weehawken
and there are, I'll show
you what it looks like,
but I wanted to try one from ground level.
I wasn't all that happen with it.
I think it's still better from Weehawken.
I spend a lot of time in
the gutters of New York.
If you're ever shooting a reflection,
one of the things that you
need to do is make sure
that the bottom of your camera is wet.
If your camera is not on top of the water,
you will not have a proper reflection.
You'll be too high and
the space between here,
the higher the camera, the wider this gets
and you want to narrow this space here
so that it's almost like a perfect mirror.
So gotta get the bottom of your camera wet
and then dry it off really fast
but you gotta get it wet.
I've never wrecked a camera
yet because of it, but.
Again, low level.
When you're looking up at something,
there's a dramatic feel to it.
It gives something a
little more stature, so.
That's in Hoboken.
Telephoto lenses, I shoot
a lot of telephoto lenses.
One of my tricks about
photographing with long lenses is
I have a little Canon mirrorless camera.
It's called an M5.
It's a one inch sensor
and Canon makes an adapter
to put regular Canon EF lenses
on it that you would use on
5D or a 1DX or whatever
and it doubles the focal length
when you put it on this
little mirrorless camera
so I have a little 300 F4 camera lens
and a little 40056, so when I put it on
my Canon mirrorless camera,
my M5, I get a 600 and
800 millimeter lens,
so I use those for the
moon rises, you know,
all the moon rises that I shoot
are usually shot with that, so.
800 millimeters, yeah, so
this picture here is shot
like from a block away from
where these people are.
I think it was a 600 millimeter lens
looking down 42nd Street.
One of the things that's really nice is
after you have Manhattan
henge in May, right,
the sun is now setting, when the sun sets,
it has to pass by 42nd Street,
so what happens is
the sun is directly behind me here.
This is like a day or two
after the first Manhattan henge
in May, it illuminates
42nd Street from New York
all the way to Queens in the background.
And the whole street lights up in sunlight
and it's quite a beautiful effect.
It's just chasing light,
New York has the most beautiful light.
It's everywhere and the
best thing about living
in New York and being a
photographer in New York
is they tell you never to
photograph at high noon
when the sun is at the
highest point in the sky.
That's one of the best times
to photograph in New York
because the light bounces
around off glass windows
and you get reflective light and backlight
and you get all this incredible
weird streaks of light
coming through buildings
when the sun is up high,
especially as it's
moving down at the bottom
of lower Manhattan and it's
shooting right up Fifth Avenue
or it's coming up Seventh
Avenue or Sixth Avenue,
it's really beautiful to
photograph directly into the light
at the time of day when they tell you
it's the worst light to
be photographing in, so.
Brooklyn Bridge, what's
better than walking across
the Brooklyn Bridge at
sunset on a summer night.
It's just spectacular and we
have so many opportunities
in New York, whether it's walking
across the Brooklyn Bridge
or the Manhattan Bridge or
the Williamsburg Bridge.
Whoever built them, they
thought about the foot traffic,
they thought about pedestrians.
I'm so thankful that these
opportunities exist in this city.
I have fun with birds.
I love birds and geese and I
love playing around with them.
Moonrise goose, I'm Canadian,
I look for my Canadian cousins
and photograph them a lot.
So this was a moonrise,
we saw the moonrise
down 42nd Street from ground.
This is the moonrise from
King's Bluff in Weehawken.
This usually happens
in June, June or July,
usually you get the moon
rising and passing through
the 42nd Street canyon, so.
And also,
you get a little bit of
reflective light off of sunset
that night to get some
orange in the buildings
and it's a classic New
York picture now, is this
orange moon and June, it's also called
the Strawberry Moon, not because it's red,
it's 'cause it's for
the strawberry harvest.
But everybody has this
fascination and romance
with the Strawberry Moon so I
always hope that the June moon
is not clouded out and
we can actually see it.
Fireworks, everybody love
a good fireworks show?
This is Fourth of July.
The standard thing for a photographer
is to go to Brooklyn or Queens
to photograph the fireworks
because they're on the East River
and people wanna see the fireworks.
They wanna be underneath
them and really enjoy
the beauty of them, when
I'm doing the fireworks,
this is shot from Jersey City
so this is across Manhattan
to the other side and the
reason that I do that is
if you go to Brooklyn or
Queens and do fireworks,
you get giant fireworks
and a tiny little city
'cause you gotta use a
really wide angle lens
at the bottom of your frame,
you have a very small New York City
and if I go to Jersey
City, I get big fireworks,
big buildings and it just,
the telephoto lens compresses it all and
the fireworks only work
if you're gonna do this
from Jersey City, they only
work when they have the barges
up around 34th to 42nd Street.
Some years they put the barges down to
the Brooklyn Bridge and then
the buildings are too high
in lower Manhattan, you
can't do a good picture,
so it only works, the last two years
they've had it up town near 42nd Street
so it works really nice.
There's a very nice flat spot to the right
of the Empire State Building.
Manhattan henge at night.
Sunset Manhattan henge, I love it.
I just love the chaos,
I love the cab drivers
yelling and screaming,
the people in the street
that don't get outta the way
and again, I'll give
you another little tip.
- Where are you?
- This picture
was taken from the Pershing Bridge at,
it's across 42nd Street
in front of Grand Central.
- What time did you get there?
- I got there about 5:45
for an 8:15 sunset.
There were 300 people on this bridge.
There's four lanes of traffic,
it reduces barely to one
and it's just packed but
one little tip I'll give you
about photographing Manhattan henge,
this is shot on a mobile
phone, this picture.
All the pictures, I never
use a phone for photography.
I only use cameras, I
have a camera in my pocket
all the time, I don't like using my phone.
I have more control over the exposure,
more control over zooming
and stuff like that, ISO
and stuff with a regular camera, so.
But on Manhattan henge
night, if you shoot this
with a regular camera, the
street's gonna be black
because it's in shadow and if you expose
for the sun, the street's gonna be black,
the sun's gonna be good.
If you expose for the shadow,
the sun will be overexposed
and you won't see it, it'll
just be white at the end.
So I shot it with a mobile phone.
Guess what, the mobile
phones balance the light
better than a camera.
The camera's true, the mobile phone,
the best description I ever read
was when the Google
Pixel 3 camera came out
a few months ago, the tech
writer in the Washington post
described the phone as
producing the most exquisite
faketastic pictures ever, I
thought that was a great term,
faketastic and it's right, it's right.
Who knows what they're
doing, what Google and Apple
are doing in their image processing
but you can't beat it, you can't beat it
for this really difficult situation.
That's the next night, Manhattan henge,
shot with an 800 millimeter lens
just by being on the street.
That's the bridge I was
on where those people are
for the picture before.
That's the Pershing Square Bridge
and that's just shot from
about Third Avenue and 42nd
with an 800 millimeter lens
as the sun was starting
to make its way through the canyon.
I like to shoot through a lot of things.
Frame things up, add something, you know,
add something to the picture
to make it a little interesting
just try to find something,
that's a pier in Hoboken,
Pier C, the entrance to it.
Again, foul weather, you gotta go out.
It's just beautiful to be
out in the rain and fog
and mist and stuff like that.
It's really a pretty time
to photograph in New York.
Washington Square is one of my favorite
parks in the city.
Lightning, everybody likes a
good lightning storm, right?
I chase lightning, all
spring and summer and fall,
I chase lightning, I think lightning
are some of the most spectacular
pictures in New York City
and I've got a few in here.
Again, there's a weather app that I use,
it's called Radar Scope, it's
a professional weather app.
I think it's like a $10 download
and for a $10 a year subscription,
they tell you where the lightning is
so that if a storm is
moving toward New York City
and there's lightning in the
storm, put Zs in the clouds,
you know, it's the radar app
and so from a photographer's perspective,
it's really handy to know
that this particular storm
has lightning, not every
storm in the summer
has lightning in it, so if I'll be at home
and I see a storm forming
and the radar on the app
is up to the minute so it's real time
and again, lightning's not random.
You don't go out and just find it.
You can track it on an app
and you can put yourself
in a position to get
it just by watching the
direction that the storms are coming in.
This is a day time
storm, really really hard
to photograph lightning in the daytime
because you can't really,
without a neutral density filter,
that will blacken out
the front of your lens
and maybe allow you to do
a 15 or 20 second exposure
which I don't have
on a neutral density,
you have to react to it.
The lightning hits and you
have to push the button
and sometimes you get it
and sometimes you don't.
This was another night.
This was another one, last summer.
Lightning is much easier
to photograph at night.
You can do a 30 second
exposure and just keep opening
the shutter, and inevitably,
your camera's gonna go click,
the lightning's gonna go off
before you can open it again.
I cannot even begin to
tell you how many times
that has happened.
There's also technology out there
where you can put a light
sensor on the top of your camera
and when the lightning happens,
it triggers your camera,
it reads it, but to me
that's just cheating,
it's not fun, it's just not fun.
Everybody like the Oculus,
what's everybody's favorite,
Grand Central or the Oculus?
Oculus, modern architecture?
Both are spectacular.
I don't think there's a
bad angle to the Oculus.
There's not a bad time to photograph it.
It's got lines, it's got light,
it's got repetitive lines.
Indoors, outdoors, it's
just an amazing structure
to photograph and I think
we're very privileged.
Even though they spent a
billion and a half dollars on it
of our tax dollars I think it's
still a spectacular building
for photographers to work in.
What I don't like is the fact
that it's a shopping mall
and Westfield who owns
it has turned it into
a space that is used for events
on the floor of the Oculus
and it is,
you know, when they first
built it was pristine clean.
It was white marble and
everything was white
and the flow of people and the silhouette
of their bodies against the
white floor was I thought
one of the most beautiful
things about the building
and now they've littered
the floor with chairs
and popup stores and
events and I think they've
destroyed the character that
Santiago Calatrava designed
the building to have and
anybody remember the white
walkway, that Link Brookfield place, too,
under One World Trade Center
before the Oculus opened?
There was that long white walkway
and it was the most
beautiful thing, right?
It was like everybody loved that thing
and then what did they do to it?
They hung a three block long
TV screen for Lay's
potato chip ads and things
and they destroyed the whole
aesthetic of the walkway
and I remember reading a story that
the New York Times wrote a
story about how Westfield
destroyed the aesthetic and
Santiago Calatrava said,
"We never designed this
place to be like that"
and Westfield's response
was, "Somebody's gotta pay
"for this space," so
they've, I just hate when
that kind of thing happens,
like a big building going up
and blocking the Empire State Building.
You take a beautiful pristine
beautifully designed piece of architecture
and you destroy it by
putting advertising on it.
Again, more moonrises
from Liberty State Park.
The tribute in lights,
helicopters, you know,
they're the bane of everybody's
existence here in New York,
right, we hate their
noise, just hate them.
They're flying in and out,
they're always in your pictures,
you do long exposures at night,
there's always red lights and white lights
going through your skies,
but here, it kinda worked.
They were circling around the lights
and so you get lucky one night and you do
a one minute exposure or
a 30 second, what it was,
but you use them for your pictures.
Fireworks, one of the things
that I was gonna mention is
you guys realize that there
are fireworks in New York
almost every week in the summer?
It's not just the Fourth of July.
There are these private
celebrations all summer long
and if you're interested in fireworks
and you're interested in
photographing fireworks,
the city has a website,
if you just go to Google
and search NYC and fireworks,
you'll find an nyc.gov
website that lists all the
approved fireworks shows
for the week and you'll
see them all summer long.
So a lot of people will
write on my Twitter feed,
oh, I heard the fireworks and
I didn't know what they were,
I heard the bang and I didn't
know what they were for
and then on Twitter
they'll see the picture
and they go thank you
for sharing the picture
because now I know why
there was a firework.
But it's all private companies
that put on five minute shows
like this and they're
spectacular and those of us
that live in Jersey have to put up
with these fireworks shows,
we used to have Macy's
but they're now always on the East River,
and we have these smaller ones.
Sunrise in Jersey City,
steam, everybody loves steam.
Such a beautiful thing
about New York, right,
you walk down the street
and there's steam clouds
and steam pipes creating these
clouds all over the city.
I love steam, it's like fog, right?
So all this is is a steam
pipe at 42nd and Sixth
or 43rd and Sixth and the
Empire State Building's
in the background, you just
kinda put yourself in the steam
and you can shroud the
Empire State Building.
Lightning again, this night,
the ultimate for
lightning is when you have
a dry lightning storm, an
electrical storm with no rain.
Which is what this night was, the
World Trade Center got
hit 23 times in one hour
and I was lucky to get 17
of the 23 strikes, so yes?
- [Man] Do you protect yourself
when you're taking lightning pictures?
- In Hoboken, usually I shoot from Hoboken
and there's a gazebo so I'm covered.
Don't get too wet if it is raining
but it's a metal roof so it's kinda stupid
but you stay dry.
The closest the lightning's ever come,
I go out for like every lightning storm
and the closest it's ever
come was there was one bolt
that hit the middle of the Hudson River
and I was like right on
the edge of the river
and then there was another
one that hit a building
at Steven's Institute of Technology
which is up on an elevated
position in Hoboken
and it hit the top of the building
so it's close but not that close to me
and then there's another
place in Jersey City
that I go, there's a
restaurant in Jersey City
that has a patio that's
covered right across
from World Trade Center
in lower Manhattan.
But I've never been really
hit and I've never felt
too much danger, but.
There's too much of a
desire to go out and try
to get this picture to stay home, yep.
Again, back in Weehawken,
Weehawken, this park here
is weddings, quinceneras,
everything, everybody wants
to have their picture taken
in front of New York City.
That is a fact.
It's never ending.
That's from the lower tip of Manhattan
down in Battery Park, just shooting.
The sun, there's a week
or two in the winter
where the late winter,
you know, like January
where the sun sets behind the statue
for about a week and then after that week
because the sun is now, you
know, after December 31st,
sorry, December 21st,
the sun is now setting
one minute to the north
every day until the first day
of summer, as it sets to the north,
you've gotta start moving from
the lower tip of Manhattan
across, say, the Manhattan bridge
and then into Brooklyn and then down South
in Brooklyn all the way
to Red Hook, you know,
so the app shows you the
path and you can figure out
where to stand, so one of my
favorite pictures is shooting
through the Brooklyn Bridge
to the Statue of Liberty
with the sun setting behind
it and you have to shoot that
from the Manhattan Bridge.
You have literally about five
days in January to do that
and then it's just gone until
like six or seven months
later when the sun is starting
to make its way back.
This is,
I got two of these because I
just got one the other day.
This is sunset, you'll remember this one.
It's moonrise, I love moonrises at sunset.
One of the tips that I can
tell you is if you're standing
next to the Hudson River in Jersey City
and you want to shoot a moonrise or a moon
near the World Trade Center,
it takes exactly 90 minutes
for the moon to make its way to the top
of the World Trade Center.
So if it says the moon is
rising at, sorry, the sun is
setting at 5:30 or six o'clock,
and the moon is rising at four,
say the moon rises at
four, sun sets at 5:30,
at 5:30, the moon will be at the top
of the World Trade Center.
It takes 90 minutes to get to the top
of the World Trade Center.
So I go out, there's one
day every month where the
moon's position at the top
of the World Trade Center
will be exactly at the top
when the sun is setting
and I always make sure,
it's not a full moon.
It's about three days
before the full moon.
That is, it's a ferry dock
for a New York waterway.
Harbor side ferry dock in Jersey City.
It's a walkway that goes
out to where the boat docks.
I'll show you another one
at sunrise that I shot
just two days ago, so.
Yesterday, sorry,
yesterday, it's at the end.
Again, shooting through things.
Put something interesting
in front of your subject
and you'll
make a little more interesting photograph.
So this is for me one of
the ultimate in shooting
a moonrise in New York.
The distance from where I'm standing
to the World Trade Center is 25 miles.
It's a place called Washington Rock Park.
It's in Greenbrook Township in
New Jersey, any of you familiar with
Bridge Water?
It's just before Bridgewater,
it's a long way, 25 miles.
I tried to get this
picture for four years.
No joke, you know, it
rarely lines up in this
alignment where the moon comes up
behind the World Trade Center.
On a full moon, it does
line up on smaller moons
but on a full moon, the
last two times was like
a year and a half ago and
then a year and a half ago
before that, they were cloudy nights,
so this was shot in October
and I had been waiting
almost four years to try
and get that picture so yes?
- [Woman] Am I mistaken,
or is that moon flattened?
I mean, it's squashed, sort of.
- Yeah, one of the things
about photographing the moon
when it's,
one, with a telephoto lens,
it compresses everything.
So it's
a six or an 800 millimeter lens
and when the moon is rising
just on the horizon there's
a lot of gunk in the air
that squished the moon so
it's exactly how it looks
but it flattens it and
sometimes it squishes it down
and you don't get a perfect, round,
it's all got to do with
the atmospheric conditions
and the lens that you're using, correct.
Look at this light, this is crazy.
Rainstorm went through
and the black clouds
are behind the city and the
sun came out, you know, from
Liberty State Park, it was just
one of those weird and wacky
That's why you go out every
night because that happens.
You can't plan for this.
You sort of can plan for it
if you look at the weather app
and you look at the
radar and it says the sun
is supposed to come
out around five o'clock
and a storm will move through,
you can watch the clouds
on the radar app move through
and so you can sort of
plan for that, one of the
things that you can plan for
are rainbows, you can almost,
you can time the sun set,
say, for example, when you
think the sun's gonna set
and when a storm's gonna pass through
and you can almost predict a
rainbow by looking at the apps.
Clouds at sunset over the city.
This is way up in Edgewater.
Way up the river in
Edgewater, looking back,
stacking up all the new
buildings on the West Side
of Manhattan, Hudson
Yards, World Trade Center.
Fog again, a rainy foggy
night over Times Square
and you get all this color
that fills up the sky.
More steam, rainy night with a steam cloud
on West Broadway, was a helping hand.
I spend a lot of time with
the seagulls in Hoboken.
They're my buddies. (laughs)
I don't feed them, I
don't do anything with 'em
but every once in a
while you get a seagull
that's just not scared
of you and that camera
couldn't have been more than
about this far from its face
and I love the birds, I really do.
Reflections in snow,
that's the Millennial Hotel
in lower Manhattan.
Jersey City.
Our parade, everybody
goes, I love the parade.
It doesn't really fit
in all the stuff I do
but I just love the parade.
It's a lot of fun.
Here's another example of a
moonrise that I had waited
four years to shoot.
There's a street in the docks of Newark
where this is shot, it's
probably six to seven miles
from where I'm standing to
the Empire State Building.
I've always liked these homes
that are in Jersey City.
I'm standing in Newark, the
homes are in Jersey City.
There's a big body of water
between me and the homes
and then you've got all of Jersey City
and then into Manhattan and
there's one street in the docks
that you have a perfect
view of lower Manhattan and
Midtown Manhattan and
rarely does the moon,
a full moon rise with
the Empire State Building
if you were standing in this one spot.
Just think how long you have to wait.
You pick a spot that you
know is gonna be perfect.
How long will it take for the moon?
How many months, years
will it take for the moon
to actually go through its
orbits and actually line up
with that one specific structure so.
I'd been there a couple of
other times, it was cloudy,
a couple other times over the years
but this happened in
November so if it's clear
on Wednesday night next week,
I'm gonna go to the same place
but I'm gonna do it behind
the World Trade Center.
It's gonna line up with
the World Trade Center.
Okay.
Sunrise, this is Bayonne, New Jersey.
Anybody know the Teardrop
9/11 Memorial in Bayonne?
You and me and Katrina
are maybe the only ones.
There is this giant 9/11
memorial donated to the US
by Russia that sits at
the end of a cargo dock
in Bayonne New Jersey,
nobody knows it's there.
Nobody goes there.
The gates are never locked.
They never shut it but you
have this view of New York City
from there, no picture that
I ever put on Instagram
or Twitter or any social
media elicits more comments
of fake photography than this picture.
Because it's just incredible,
everybody goes that is so fake
The Statue of Liberty does
not sit in Midtown Manhattan,
and people write this,
they can't figure out
how you can possibly, it doesn't
line up, it's not possible,
blah blah blah, but that's
the exact view that you get
from Bayonne New Jersey and this dock.
It all lines up really nicely.
Unfortunately, Harry Mackelow
built that horrible building
that we all hate more than any
other building in New York.
One of the nice things
that is happening is
where those two cranes are on the right,
that's the new building next
to Grand Central Station
called One Vanderbilt and it's now up high
and it's gonna be like a 90 story building
and in many angles from South Jersey,
whether it's Bayonne
or Liberty State Park,
it's now balancing out that
horrible white building
so that one building's on one side
of the Empire State
Building and one building's
on the other side and it's
starting to have a little more
balanced feel and it's less annoying
to see 432 Park Avenue there.
Times Square.
In the rain.
Just light, you know, again,
just going out every night.
You never know what color
the light's gonna be.
Typically, there's no day
to shoot a sunset worse
than a blue sky, cloudless day.
There's nothing in the sky
that retains the light.
The sun goes down, the
light goes away so fast.
You want some cloud cover,
you want some patchy,
broken clouds to turn orange
and then illuminate the city.
This night, I don't know
where this light came from
but there was moisture in the air
and when you talk about
moisture in the air,
you're talking about high atmosphere,
there's moisture in the high atmosphere,
it's ice crystals and
your color comes from
the sun refracting
through the ice crystals
and creating the light just
like a prism that you can have.
This picture is sunrise.
I love this picture because
it shows you how empty
One World Trade Center is, you know?
The whole middle part of
the World Trade Center
is not rented.
You can see the elevator
banks and you can see
how all these floors, there's
occupants here and here.
There's no occupants here
because they put no walls up.
It's not built out for offices
so when the sun comes up behind it,
it just burns right through the building
and you can see all the
way to the elevator banks.
Pretty weird.
Again, lower Manhattan.
The cranes are on the piers in Bayonne.
That's from Battery Park.
That's the view from
Hoboken, terrible view.
Worth living in Hoboken
because it's so ugly, right?
Fog again, foggy night.
In New York.
Hudson Yards.
You know, this is another example where
I try to have people in
as many pictures as I can.
I like silhouettes, I like the scale,
I like to have something
in there other than just
a building and
again, that's from Hoboken,
you wait for the light,
somebody runs by, you get
lucky that they ran through
your picture, you know?
There's a walkway up
the center of this park.
Usually they go all the way around
and you would never see them,
so I've been photographing
this development
for years and years
and you realize this is only half, right?
Five buildings, there's gonna
be another five buildings
to the north that they've
already started building.
And you guys, are you familiar
with this thing up here?
They just named it the other day,
it's now called the Edge, it's
an outdoor observation deck
at the 100th floor of that
building, 30 Hudson yard.
It's not gonna open for another year
but it's outdoors at 100 floors up.
It's gonna be spectacular to see.
I spent a lot of time in subway entrances.
I like the view from low
looking up, the ultimate view.
That's at Eighth Avenue and 34th.
Again, Hudson Yards,
Katrina owns this view
from where she lives,
she sees this every day.
It's beautiful the
stuff that you do there.
Oh, jeez, I looked out
my office window one day
and that's what I saw, again, at work
so you never know, right?
This is the light that comes
and goes in New York City.
Again, Manhattan henge,
so this is the high view
from the top of
the bluff in Weehawken.
You saw the low view before,
which one do you like better?
Do you like high or low?
I can never figure out or
decide whether I should go
high or low when this happens.
I'm partial more to the high
view rather than the low view.
What do you guys think?
You agree, yeah?
Yeah, it's quite nice.
Place to be, trees, nothing like trees
and the branches in the winter.
More steam in New York, it's everywhere,
everywhere you look, steam is everywhere.
Wait for the cars to illuminate it.
Just hang out on the
street for a little bit.
Again, sunset, I think she looks great
whether it's the front or the back.
I don't get to the front very
often because you gotta go
like to Red Hook in Brooklyn
which is a long hike
and expensive with the tolls
on the bridges and stuff,
the tunnels, but.
That was the eclipse in January.
Sunset on Chinatown.
Snow, the biggest trick and
the biggest cliche trick
in the world is find
something black to shoot
the snow against and use
a slow shutter speed.
Makes it looks like a bigger
blizzard than it really is.
These doormen are out there
in the front, rain or snow,
doormen at the Empire State
Building never go inside.
They're always out there, so
they're a good model to use
when it's snowing out.
Sometimes you just stand
in the middle of the street
like an idiot and people look at you like
what are you doing?
To get something and hope
that a car doesn't come
screaming around the corner
there, making a left turn
and take you out.
Sunrise.
In Jersey City.
Sunset, this was Super Bowl night.
Everybody said the orange or the red was,
it foreshadowed the
Patriots winning that night.
A lot of Patriot fans
liking that picture, yes?
Five minutes, I'm right at the end here.
So again, hey, I looked out the window
of my office again and there
was this beautiful streaming,
it was kind of like a foggy morning
and all this light came down 48th street
and it was just a beautiful feel to it.
We all know this view.
I really only have it in here
because apparently we're
gonna lose this view.
You know, over by the side
of the Manhattan Bridge
there's a building called
One Manhattan Square.
That is right beside the Manhattan
bridge and it's over here
and they've just approved
three more buildings
to be built to the north
of One Manhattan Square
and there's gonna be one here, one here
and one right there, so
there's a big battle going on
about, it's a big battle
going on right now about
whether or not they should
approve those buildings.
This was an Instagram meetup
inside a $25 thousand a month
apartment on Murray
Street in lower Manhattan.
Real estate agents in this town
bring Instagram photographers
together in the hope that
they'll publicize the apartment
that is for rent.
A week after this Instagram meet,
they actually rented the building.
The real estate agent
likes to think it's because
of his photographers
that he brought in there
to photograph it and show the view.
Sometimes you get lucky and
a dog jumps in front of you.
You never know.
This is sunrise from Eagle Rock.
Again.
Weehawken, spend a lot
of time in Weehawken.
That's the supermoon.
This was when the
supermoon rising one night.
This is the same moon
setting the next morning.
So this is from Hoboken.
This is from Red Hook in Brooklyn.
Big lightbulb, looks like a lightbulb,
again, the reflective light.
Grand Central.
Another thing is trying,
you can never predict
when that light's gonna come through.
That's sunset and the light is
reflecting off of buildings,
probably the Grand
Hyatt on the other side.
Chrysler Building, reflections.
Billionaire's Row, yes.
- [Man] I just walked past that building
that's being built at One Vanderbilt.
Is One Vanderbilt gonna block
that light of that window?
I always loved the light
coming through those windows.
- Oh no, One Vanderbilt.
- It's further down?
- It's going to affect the
sunset light potentially
coming in the west windows
of the, yeah, yeah,
entirely possible, yeah, exactly.
So the building in the center
there, the tall one, that is
almost, this is about 200 feet short
of where it's gonna end up.
It's gonna be the tallest
residential building
in the world, it's called
Central Park Tower.
It's gonna be 1550 feet tall.
It's gonna have the highest
apartment in the world.
It's gonna have the highest roof
in the western hemisphere.
One World Trade Center
is the tallest building
in the western hemisphere at 1776,
but the roof is only 1400 feet
so this building here is gonna be
1550 feet tall, it's just crazy.
So what I would like to know is
this is the building that
sold the top penthouse
for $238 million a few weeks ago.
But it was a triplex,
it's the top three floors
for one building, what's that gonna be?
What's the price tag on the apartment
that says I'm living higher
than anybody else in the world?
I just can't imagine how many,
$300 million, I don't know.
It's crazy.
These are right at the end here.
That was Saturday morning last week and
it's the same picture
that I showed you before
with the moon, this is the sun rising
and I think that's the last one, yep, so.
(audience applauds)
- [Man] Hi, Ashland
Pictures, did you do anything
for the solar eclipse?
- Yes, I did, in fact.
How can I show it to you?
I'll see if I can find it.
I purposefully stayed in New York City
for the solar eclipse.
I'll let you in, I know
where I can show it to you.
I think I have...
I don't know if I have, oh, maybe I do.
I have a book coming out so finally,
I have a book coming out in July
that is going to be only
on the sun and the moon.
I'm going to have another
book coming out next year
that's all the other
pictures of New York City
but we're gonna time a book in July
to the 50th anniversary
of the man on the moon
and the book's gonna be
about celestial events
that happened over New York
City, so I don't know if I have.
So I specifically stayed
in New York City to do this
because I wanted this
picture to be in the book
that I knew eventually I would do.
Well, all the other photographers in town,
all the Instagram photographers
ran down to North Carolina
and went down across the
country to photograph
the black dot in the sky,
I stayed in New York.
I knew that the eclipse
was gonna pass right over
the Empire State Building,
standing on the corner
of 36th and Fifth and sure
enough, it was exactly
where it was supposed
to be and I was happy,
I was happy that there were clouds.
It was almost an
impossible picture to take
'cause you're using a solar
filter which is making it orange
and you're using a solar
filter and it's going to
drop your exposure so far
down that the buildings
are gonna be dark, if
the sun was out full,
the buildings are gonna be dark
when you're exposed for the sun
so the clouds helped even
out the exposure a lot
and between the filter
and the sun in the clouds
I was able to keep both the silhouette
of the Empire State Building and the
sun in the same frame, so
I was happy to have stayed
and got that, it was about
73% covered, you know,
so a crescent sun, I
thought it was quite nice.
I was happy that I
stayed and didn't go off
and try to do the black dot in the sky.
- [Man] All along were
you working towards a book
or was the focus publish
at the end of the project
regardless?
- No, no, no,
the project never ends.
The city is going through
the biggest construction boom
right now that it has gone
through since the 1920s
and '30s when the Chrysler
Building was built,
when the Empire State Building was built.
And the fact that the
second phase of Hudson Yards
is just starting to come
up out of the ground,
out of their foundations,
means that in the next
two or three years are gonna be
great opportunities to
add to the projects.
For me it's really
about a 10 year project,
2011 to 2021 kinda thing.
And so no intention of
stopping what I'm doing
and I'm out there trying to
shoot pictures every day.
I have until like the end of March
to keep adding to this book and I want it,
when it comes out, to have
as fresh material as I can.
- [Woman] Did you start
out just sort of following
your obsessions because this does, I mean,
I'm fascinated with this, it
takes a certain kind of mind
that will follow all of
the phases of the moon
and where you can see it,
were you just initially
following these obsessions
and hunting down these shots?
- Well, it all started with,
okay, so in the summer
of 2011 I figured out
that there's beautiful light out there
that I had never realized existed
so that started my following
the sun and the sunset
and then the moonrise in May of 2011,
the supermoon in 2012, made
me fall in love with moonrises
and I just became obsessed
with it then, right?
And like you say, the beautiful
thing about the moon is
you look at the app, it
tells you where to stand,
it says that the moon is
gonna rise at 5:52 PM.
You get there at 5:45 and
you leave at six o'clock
and the whole thing takes 15 minutes
because after the moon gets
up to a certain height,
it's done because it just turns
too bright and it's white.
So I love this kind of photography
because it's short and sweet.
And you don't really spend
a lot of time at it and
it's just how I've always worked.
When I was a sports photographer,
I loved going to the game,
shooting for a few minutes
and going into the darkroom
and developing the film and
getting the first pictures
out on the wire when I worked at Reuters
and I was done, right,
I didn't have to stay
for the whole game and I
find this kind of photography
the same thing, it's
frustrating that you're planning
for this big moon and it's
cloudy and you get there
and it's cloudy or it's raining
and you don't go out at all
but it takes so little time
and it's so easy to move to the places
from where I live in
Jersey to shoot them that
it's an obsession to
go out and do it a lot
but the effort to go do
it is very minimal, so.
- [Woman] And the second part to that.
Were you looking for a book deal
or did somebody approach you?
- No, I was never looking for a book deal.
I always hoped someday the
whole package of pictures
that I've shot would be a book deal.
It's one day but it came to me.
The publisher is PSG in
Chicago, Warren Winter,
Warren publishes photo books,
he did the book on
Hillary Clinton last year
for Barbara Kinney, he did two books
with the Louisville Courier Journal
on the Kentucky Derby and Mohammed Ali,
just magnificent books,
he did a fantastic book
with Vincent Laforay, a former
New York Times photographer
called Air, Vincent shot New
York City and other cities
around the world from a
helicopter at 10,000 feet
and so Warren was a great,
I knew him, he was a friend.
He had mentioned to me two years ago that
he'd like to do a book eventually.
Then he got really busy
doing other projects
and I saw him but we never
talked about the book
and then one morning Robert
Kaplan, a mutual friend,
asked me if he could
share one of my pictures
on the photo brigade Instagram feed
and he said it was like nine
o'clock on a Sunday morning,
he said, "Where's your book?"
I said, "I don't know when
Warren's gonna get around
"to doing it, but," and
Warren's a mutual friend
and about 30 seconds later
I got a text from Warren.
"Let's do the book," because
Robert said to Warren,
"Where's the book?" and so
this was in late January
and we've gone from
nothing in late January
to having like 19 layouts,
I'm waiting for version 20.
And he had a cover and a
back cover picked in about
two hours that Sunday
afternoon and just fast,
and hopefully this week
we're gonna launch a website
for presales and he's the kinda publisher
who determines how many copies to print
based off of the presales
that he gets on the website
and he's really big on
getting the idea of the book
out into the social media world to see
if he can get a lot of
presales and it helps him
decide how many, hi.
- I was wondering,
so a lot of the photography
that you've taken beforehand
has been very political
or obviously sports,
there's a lot of different feelings about
whatever it is that you are photographing.
- Right.
- And I'm sure
more vocal as things with
Trump have come along,
things like that
and I wondered if you
had a similar experience
when you were photographing
these or very different
and that's the reason why you
were kind of pushed away from,
how do they differ when
it comes to responses
that you get?
- Okay, so when you're covering news,
you're riding a real high in photography.
You're at the summit or
you're at the Olympics.
I did 17 Olympic games so
you're at all these big events
and your pictures are being
published on the front pages
or sport front pages or just in newspapers
or websites all over the world.
Maybe Sports Illustrated
uses a picture of yours
or maybe Time Magazine does
and it is an enormous high.
It's just an incredible high
and it's an adrenaline rush
and you push yourself
to be as good as you can
because the better you are,
the more you get published
and there got to be a time, though,
later in my career, I
left Reuters in 2014.
And as we approached the mid,
the first decade, 2008, 2007,
in there, I started to
realize that photography,
news photography wasn't
necessarily about the best picture
you could take, it was
about who could transmit
their pictures the fastest
so photography for me became
this profession that was
pushing out bad pictures quickly
and those bad pictures
were getting published
and the great pictures
were not getting published
and in my, one of the
things that I've noticed
in my capacity as a photo
editor for a website now,
a news website, we publish
a lot of bad pictures
because they fit holes that we have
and a lot of the great
pictures that are taken
don't fit into these terrible
holes that exist on websites
so I got really tired of
the whole journalism thing
and working to a deadline.
The problem is digital
photography accelerated the speed
by which you could get
your picture from you
and your camera to the
publisher who wanted
to put it on their front
page of the website.
So I got really bored with that somewhat
and I knew it was time to
get out of the business
and I knew I wanted to
get out as early as 2012.
And it didn't happen until actually 2014
and once I left, I completely
left that life behind
and completely threw myself
into this New York photography
and the difference is
I walk around the city,
like today was a perfect example.
I left the office at like three o'clock
and I had to be here at
6:30 and I went for a walk
over to the highline and
Hudson Yards and I looked
at the light and that's
what I do at the end,
that's what I do in the afternoon
and I now take pictures
that I wanna take for myself
and I take pictures that I
want to share with people
on social media and I'm getting as much
of an adrenaline rush or thrill
when I take a nice picture
and put it on social media
and people comment on it
and engage with that picture
directly, I no longer have to rely on
say, the New York Times or
nbcnews.com to use a picture
of mine, because they may not.
Maybe the photographer from
AP or Getty has a better one
or they got it out faster
and so my photographs
aren't seen by anybody so
the beauty of social media
and Instagram and all
the different platforms
is you're self publishing,
you're self publishing
what is important to you
and what you like and
you will make a connection
with your audience
and I love the fact that I
can put a picture on Twitter.
I use both Twitter and Instagram the same.
If I put a picture on
Instagram it automatically,
I put it on Twitter also
and they're two completely different
sets of followers.
And it's like the people
that follow me on Instagram
don't follow me on Twitter.
Those on Twitter only follow me on Twitter
because that's what they use
and they don't really use Instagram,
but the communication that you
get, it's thrilling to have,
I remember recently, well,
back in the fall, I should say
a mother sent me a direct message
and there's a lot of direct messages,
not just messages in the comment
section of your pictures.
She said I just dropped
my daughter off at school
in New York and I'm back home in Kentucky
and I see your pictures every day
and it makes me closer
to my daughter because I
can see what's going on in New York today
and I'm crazy enough to post every day
and it's really simple.
We live in a city where everywhere you go,
I have a camera in my
pocket, you turn a corner,
there's some beautiful
light, you photograph it
or you just take a little
different walk to the subway,
every day down a different street
and you come up with
something that is nice.
But people are waiting for those pictures.
They want to see what
the sunset looks like.
A lot of people around the
world dream about coming
to New York, they've never been here.
And they comment endlessly about
how I look at your pictures
and it's my dream to come to that city
and the ones that really
get to me are the people
who are ex New Yorkers
because I can't imagine
what it's gonna be like or
what it's like for anybody
to go through New York withdrawal
by moving away from this city.
I just don't know what that would be like.
I leave it for a week and I'm
like crazy after two days.
I wanna go home just because I feel like
I'm missing something
in New York and people will say to me,
usually in a direct
message, I lived in New York
for 20 years, I can't live there anymore,
I just can't afford it,
see Billionaire's Row
and it's a city that I
can't afford so I live
my New York experience
through your photographs.
So I get just as much
enjoyment and happiness
out of knowing that people
are looking at these pictures
and waiting for them and after
a week when I'm on vacation
they're sending me messages
going are you okay?
Are you okay, we miss your pictures.
We just want to make sure
you're not ill or anything
like that, so it's a different happiness
than seeing it on the
front of the New York Times
but it's as important as it ever was,
being published in the media.
(woman speaks indistinctly)
Where is it?
Let me get it out.
The camera in my pocket is the Canon G7X.
It's a little camera,
it's got a 28 to 70 zoom.
I leave it on P for professional.
(audience laughs)
And just, you know, push the button and
it's incredible how good.
There's an equivalent camera
this size that Sony makes
called an RX100 version six they're up to.
We have our battle between
the Sony and the Canon.
They're both spectacular cameras,
but the smaller the camera,
the more likely it is
you're gonna carry it with you.
So the other reason that I
use a camera and not the phone
is all the pictures that
I take are distributed
through Getty Images and
so they sell the pictures.
The work that I do isn't just
because I want to share it
with the world, put it on
Instagram and let people see it.
There's also a desire for
publications to use it also.
Like yesterday I took a walk
for an hour around Hudson Yards
to photograph it, it's
opening so it's in the news
and so two of the pictures I
saw on Yahoo News this morning.
They bought 'em from Getty, you know,
they downloaded 'em from Getty
so there's a reason also,
a real reason for taking
the pictures, as much
as I like to see them on
Instagram and Twitter and
engage with the audience,
I also like to see them in
print, in the news media.
But the difference is I'm on my time.
I'm not on an assignment,
I'm not on a deadline,
I'm not being told what to do.
If I take a picture and give
it to them, they're happy.
If I don't have a picture on a given day,
Getty is happy with that too.
But it's such, at my
age, I've done everything
and I like the calmness of
just being out on the street
on my own doing my own thing.
- [Man] I was actually gonna
ask about your licensing
and what kind of income
stream we can make from that
but also I'll add to that
since you addressed it
a little bit is I know some buildings
like the Chrysler Building
need property releases
I heard or something,
can you talk to that?
- So licensing, I'm
sorry, property releases.
You only need a property release
if the picture's being used commercially,
meaning in advertisement
and if that building
that's in your picture's
the predominant part
of the picture, so if you have a picture,
like that one on the top
left of Hudson Yards.
It can't be sold for an advertise use
without Hudson Yards' releasing it
and being paid a royalty for it
because they own the copyright to the look
of the building.
If you have a wide image of the skyline,
Hudson Yards is in it,
the Time Warner Center,
Central Park Tower and
the Empire State Building,
you don't need a release
because it is a generic
wide image, it's not focused on,
there's no property release
to the city of New York
for the look of its skyline.
They don't own that, nobody owns that,
but only if the building is by itself
or one of two, maybe, so,
and as far as licensing and stuff,
everything I shoot goes to Getty.
Whereas maybe I'll put
one picture on Instagram,
Getty will get 10 or 12 of the same thing.
That's last night's take
in and around Hudson yards.
I actually did a little five
picture show on Instagram
with five of these, but
another example is
I put this picture on
Instagram, for example,
and I then did another slideshow
but you can see all the
sunrise pictures that I shot
yesterday morning,
there's a lot of choice.
This is sunrise on Saturday morning.
There's a lot of choice.
And there's a lot of
photographs like this.
This is One Vanderbilt being built.
I'm trying to leave behind,
the part of the project
that really matters is
leaving behind a visual record
in an archive that is online, searchable,
the pictures are easily
found and 25 years from now,
they become historical images
and hopefully will be easily found.
Try finding a lot of
pictures of the building
of the Empire State
Building, they were taken
but they're not accessible,
they're somewhere
but they're hard to find
so Getty has given me
the opportunity to do whatever
I want with the skyline
with what's happening in New York
and they'll accept all these pictures
and they all sell, about 300,
325 a month of these pictures.
The photographs of New
York City around the world
are used to illustrate finance
stories, immigration stories,
real estate, just you name it,
pick a topic out of the air
and there will be something
about New York City that will
be used to illustrate that story,
so there's just so much choice.
This is all one night's shooting.
There's so many versions
and what's really important
that when you publish
these pictures that you put
as much information into the caption
and as many keywords as you possibly can.
You have to name the buildings.
Like this one here in
the middle, this one here
is the new B York Engels
building called the 11
and so that's in the
caption, B York Engels' name
so that if somebody searches
the architect of the moment,
they'll find all the
pictures, Central Park Tower
will be named, Time Warner Center,
this is 220 Central Park South.
This building is 111 West 57th Street
and these are all iconic new buildings
being added to the skyline.
This,
for example, you've got
this building is gonna be the
tallest residential building
in the world, this building
is being referred to
as the narrowest skyscraper in the world.
I don't know if you've noticed it
but it's like this wide
and it's 100 floors tall
and it's got 46 apartments in it.
Almost every apartment's a duplex.
And it's unique, it's a unique addition.
This pencil thin building.
And it's gonna be in the news
as they start to complete it
because they're putting an 800
ton weight on the roof of it
so that it won't fall
over and sway in the wind.
It's so narrow, so I mean,
these are technology marvels
in the construction industry
that will eventually
be written about so it's
nice to have a visual record
for the ages and
that is what really fuels my desire, is to
keep this going and to keep adding
because the skyline really
is not going to stop
for a long time and what happens is
if a new building, for example,
I've been shooting views of
lower Manhattan for forever.
I don't know if it's
in this picture or not
but you can see here,
there's a crane now here,
it's a building on 125 Greenwich Street
in lower Manhattan, it's 80 floors tall,
it's a new addition to
the Manhattan skyline
so all the pictures that I've taken, say,
three four months ago when
you couldn't see that building
are basically archived now.
Nobody's gonna buy those pictures.
They're gonna only wanna
buy a picture that has
the latest and greatest view.
So that's another reason,
that's another motivation
and inspiration to keep going out because
what happens on the
skyline of New York is,
you know, within a few months,
see, here, so this is a skyline picture,
for example, from lower Manhattan,
there's the new building.
It wasn't there a few months ago,
so you gotta go back and now photograph it
in various light, sunrise
and the windows aren't up
to the top yet, soon they will be.
That'll be a whole other look.
Once the windows are at the
top, nobody wants this picture.
It becomes useless, it's just archival,
so Central Park Tower
is the dominant building
in New York at the moment,
no question about it
and waiting and waiting and waiting for
this building to get glassed
up al the way to the top
and then all these windows here,
they're all covered in blue plastic.
Somebody's gotta go on the
outside of that building
and pull these protective
sheets off every window
for 105 floors or something.
What happens to all that plastic?
It's like the whole building
will be encased in it,
every window, so it'll be a different look
and once the windows go
all the way to the top,
these pictures won't even be
considered to be published
for, you know, 50 years.
- [Announcer] Gary, we
have to stop on that note.
We'll have to wonder about that plastic.
Thank you so much.
- You're welcome, thank you.
(audience applauds)
