NYC from the Ground and a Rooftop
2016.05.25
Day Two Hundred and Forty Eight. A tilt-shift lens should be mandatory for shooting in New York. That being said, city planners should also be required to account for how far away you have to stand from any given building to be able to properly frame it in a 24mm tilt-shift lens! In the first World Trade Center image, I was able to (with considerable effort) get far enough away that a full upward shift was good enough to capture the building in full. For the second one (the one with the weird alien building in front (it's named Oculus (which is probably just weird enough to match its crazy design))), I wasn't. Even at full upward shift, I still had to slightly angle the camera upward to not cut off the antenna. Madness.
The coolest part of the day though, was when I met up with Mike Orso and a couple of his friends (shoutout to Shiseido Ruiz & Kirit Prajapati) and we took the service elevator all the way up to a private rooftop. I'd been wanting to do rooftop work ever since I found out it was a thing. The closest I'd come before was shooting from Top of the Rock, but that only half counts because it's a tourist trap. Shooting from a private rooftop was exactly as awesome as I had expected it to be. I understand why normal buildings don't let random photographers go up there, but come on! I love rooftopping!!
