Long Live the King of Pop

A few weeks ago, it was exactly one year after Michael Jackson's death. My friend and I figured there would be something going on in the streets of New York City, and sure enough, there was music and dancing right outside of the Apollo theatre in Harlem.





Even little kids got in on the action! As you can tell, the left shoulder of this kid's shirt is "blown out," meaning that this spot is too bright to have any highlight detail and is effectively just white. If you shoot in RAW (or NEF in Nikon language) format, the information from the sensor is not processed nor is it compressed, letting you use that saved info to edit the picture. So, if you shoot in RAW, you get a lot more leeway in post-processing. In this case, I shot in JPEG and I was not able to recover the highlight-details because it was thrown out by the camera.




And the glove seems to give this guy some awesome air guitar skills.

Empire State

Living in New York, you never do the touristy stuff. At least that's how it is with me. So, I went to the Empire State Building for the first time.





I did enjoy the trip, probably more because I wasn't alone (I went with Conor and Librado Romero, photojournalist father and son). But I think I learned more about the city when I was outside of the building. I never noticed how sunlight spills through the gaps between buildings, and it creates a dramatic effect when shooting pictures, but not so much when you're looking with the naked eye. This is probably because our brains aren't limited to processing images from just one "exposure." I expect that we "see" the shadows brighter and the highlights darker, just a composite image of when everything was properly exposed. If that makes any sense. Moving along, the sunset, combined with the bright white shirt of this lady, let me expose the picture dramatically enough:



But, I could see that some people were developing fond memories up at the top of the Empire State Building. Kind of fun to capture a moment, one which someone else won't ever need a picture to remember.



Not a good picture, but you get the point.