Captured with the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 Digaron-W lens (@ f/6.3), Phase One XT IQ4-150 camera. 12mm vertical shift to maintain geometry.
This is a straightforward head-on architectural view of the facades of the varied buildings on this block just after sunrise. It took some time to line up the camera to be parallel to the faces of the building, once again making photography feel more like an exercise in surveying.
Union Square West between 16th and 17th Streets in Manhattan is home to five distinctive and variously historically significant narrow mid-rise buildings.
The quirky Decker Building (2nd from left, at 33 Union Square West) is now chiefly residential with a retail ground floor storefront. From 1967-1973 it housed Andy Warhol's "Factory" studio, where, in 1968, he was famously and nearly fatally shot by an irate Valarie Solanas. The neighborhood was more colorful back then.
@mattblaze oh man, was in Union Square at the Barnes & Noble last year, did not know that Warhol’s Factory was right there; now I’ll have to go back :)
@mattblaze I am sure it is an optical illusion. The vertical lines, if I measure them, are parallel to the vertical edge. Yet, when I look at the picture, I have the impression that the buildings are wider on top. Any idea why?
@huitema@mattblaze I think we're used to seeing the tops of buildings foreshortened in classical (and human at street level) perspective, so seeing them in a clearly 3d perspective with non-converging lines makes us feel like they must actually be getting wider as they go up.
@dave_andersen@huitema I don't see it here, but I agree that's the likely explanation. Another possibility is that the eye follows an imaginary line around the various ornamental protrusions at the roof, which would indeed make it seem to get wider toward the top.
@Nonya_Bidniss
while it's possible to get this affect in Post (or with an in-camera computational mode) via median stacking, I'm persuming @mattblaze would indicate if he was using such dark magic; and so I'd guess he's an early bird setting up his tripod at the buttcrackofdawn, before many of the denizens are up and about, and then patient until the viewfinder is devoid of rare pedestrians?
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