Manhattan Tower

March 11, 2003

I cannot for the life of me remember why I was crossing the bridge from Brooklyn into Manhattan on this morning in March.  I've been wracking my brain trying to recall, and I keep coming up empty.  I know I started on the Brooklyn side; the contact sheet from this roll has images from there.  I just don't know why, or even how I got to Brooklyn. 

And as you can see, I had the walkway pretty much to myself.  There was one group of about three people a few hundred feet in front of me, and I had to wait for them to pass under the arches in order to get this shot, but other than them, and a few bicycles, I was alone over the East River.  

It was a clear sunny day, late in the morning to judge from the sun's angle, and the classic Gothic towers were lit beautifully.  I took advantage of the light, with my main concern being symmetry.  The narrow walkway on the bridge was limiting my lateral movement, so a straight architectural composition was my  goal.

I still managed a bit of creativity, I think.  While the image is far from perfectly symmetrical (note that I wasn't even standing on the center line of the boardwalk), I like the way the cables running from the center of the tower form an asterisk of sorts as they lead down and across the upper third of the picture.  The cloudless sky also aids the composition as it seamlessly gradates from light to dark over the middle to the upper third.  Clouds would break this sense of flow, making the image jumbled and confusing to the eye.  

Finally, with one exception, every line in the picture is a straight line: verticals, horizontals, and diagonals, each vertical and diagonal matched on the left and right side, the horizontal brickwork of the tower complimenting the boards of the walkway and girders over the roadways.  The only curving lines of course, being the twin arches in the very center, which help to soften what would otherwise be a very severe image.

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