Evening light outlining the iconic financial hub, the Citigroup Building in Midtown.

For me this image is all about the light. With an older camera like the Leica M9P I used for this shot, you have only two choices in a situation like this. You can meter in the center bright portion of the image and obliterate the shadow detail, or you can meter in the dark portion of either lower corner and preserve more detail in the shadows but completely blow out the highlights. The lack of choices here would be considered a major fault of a camera system by many modern photographers using ultra modern sensor technology like the Sony A7 series, but I actually like that the old-school Leica system makes it this simple to capture the images just as it looked to me at the time, not a pumped up, semi-CGI looking version of it.

Don’t get me wrong, the landscapes and cityscapes that I’ve seen coming out of the Sony system are stunning, but I’ve never been in a situation where I could see every detail in both the brightest portions and the darkest portions of the image at the same time. The human eye is not capable of seeing light and dark that way, and a sensor that creates an image that the human eye could never see always looks a bit artificial and unnatural. It loses the feeling, the allure, the reason why that scene prompted me to put the camera to my eye in the first place.

It’s all about the light here. It feels warm. It reminds of you of that relaxing evening summer light we’ve all seen and enjoyed. And it’s ironic that the Citigroup Building is highlighted here because it takes a small fortune to purchase a Leica camera even though the technology is considered outdated and irrelevant nowadays.

Taken with a Leica M9P (out-of-production) and a Voigtlander 35mm f1.2 version I lens (also out-of-production).

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