I used to spend a lot of time worrying about getting the right shot. I was using a relatively bulky film camera, with 36 shots on a roll of film and almost always no more than two rolls of film with me. Every shot had to count, or at least I had to try to make every shot count. For a lot of interior structural work, I used black and white film for the finer grain it offers, and occasionally someone would remark that I was trying to make my report photos look cinematic. And, of course, only the original of a report would have color photos glued in, anyway, with all the copies being black and white Xeroxes.
Things change.
If we’re doing a full building survey, it’s not ridiculous to think that we might take 500 or more photos. I walk around with the last 5000 casual photos I took in my back pocket. And since we’re distributing reports as PDFs, everyone has the same quality and the same color.
I still don’t usually try for arty shots. I prefer to simply take a picture of what interests me, and let the subject be what it is. But then I took the photo above, as an example of what makes Tribeca visually interesting, and seem to have accidentally strayed into artiness. We’ve got two late-1800s industrial buildings, let and right foreground, flanking a much smaller mid-1800s industrial building. All three, of course have long since been converted to rich people’s homes. In the background, 56 Leonard Street, AKA The Jenga Building, completed in 2017. And way, way off in the distance, the moon.
