New York City Noir

Western Skies

The quality of light is much different in the West than East.  The above photograph was actually taken in the late afternoon in sunny hazy skies from an overlook in Santa Fe, and that was pretty much how it appeared on the contact sheet.  Leaving Santa Fe a couple of days later, though, I saw from the highway a thunderstorm over a mountaintop that looked almost exactly like the pic above.  By burning in the image for twice the normal exposure, I was able to transform the sunny afternoon into something more menacing that more closely resembled the scene I had seen from the highway.  It was the detail in the cloud structure that enabled me to do this.

Nikon 50mm 1.4 lens

I picked up a prime lens -- a Nikon 50mm 1.4 -- at B&H last week.  Like many Nikon lenses, this one is only intermittently in stock at the store and I had to wait a couple of months for it to arrive. 

The main advantage to the lens is that it should be considerably sharper than the zoom lenses I have used almost exclusively for the past several years.  At least, I'm hoping that this will be the case.  In any event, the lens was comparatively cheap (about $300), and I should have fun experimenting with it when doing street photography.  The 1.4 aperture should also provide me with enough speed to shoot at night on 1600 ISO film without flash.