Fun With Framing

From a recent trip to Staten Island, a view looking north across the harbor to Manhattan and Brooklyn:

New York looks, unfortunately, much like a chain-link fence. The catenaries that we see are some nearby power lines, not far-off suspension bridges. Cropping helps

but not enough. I can’t zoom in now, while sitting at my desk, because the image is what it is – the first image above is the full image – so all I can do is crop some more and display it larger. Here’s the Manhattan side:

And the Brooklyn side:

Note that the building on the far right in Brooklyn, the Williamsburgh Bank Tower, was the tallest building in Brooklyn from 1928 until 2009.

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One of the more famous moments in the 1982 movie Blade Runner involves Harrison Ford’s character examining a photo. He keeps telling his (voice-activated) computer to zoom in and “enhance” and eventually finds a detail that was not previously visible. In reality, zooming is limited by the graininess of the original, whether pixels from a digital camera (as here) or the physical graininess of the film in the old days. You can’t enhance parts of an image that were literally lost in the graininess. The original here was 4032 by 3024 pixels, which is quite good, but when I zoom in to ten percent of the old frame, there’s only so much detail left.