NewYork_210308

Leon,

  Wow...excellent image with perfect timing.  Take care, Patsy

Superb work.Congrats.Regards.

I like photo!! fine work!!

Excellent timing I would say :)

AWESOME...GOD !!

Please note the following:

• This image has been selected for discussion. It is not necessarily the "best" picture the Elves have seen this week, nor is it a contest.
• Discussion of photo.net policy, including the choice of Photograph of the Week should not take place here, but in the Help & Questions Forum.
• The About Photograph of the Week page tells you more about this feature of photo.net.
• Before writing a contribution to this thread, please consider our reason for having this forum: to help people learn about photography. Visitors have browsed the gallery, found a few striking images and want to know things like why is it a good picture, why does it work? Or, indeed, why doesn't it work, or how could it be improved? Try to answer such questions with your contribution.

Airplanes and buildings, the context have a special significance in New York. Yet, when I looked at this it made me think of an old British Airways advert with the theme tune from a Leo Delibe opera. It feels the world is a smaller place. The buildings are nearly touching that stairway to a small world.

Everything is sharp. The framing is perfect. The jet is in just the right place. The colors and tones are just right. I do, however, detect a significant barrel distortion in the buildings and the airplane. This is annoying. I do not think this was taken with a fisheye lens. Rather, I sense this was taken with a zoom with considerable distortion at the wide end. I could be wrong. At any rate, the distortion is there.

This aside, there is something familiar about this photograph, as Starvy Goodfellows intimates. I might have taken a photograph like this at some time when i was in New York. I suspect that millions of tourists have shot similar photographs.

So what makes this photograph different from an ordinary from an ordinary tourist snapshot. The careful composition most importantly. The timing is perfect. The balance between jet and buildings is right. Also the balance between light and dark areas is probably as good as it can get. Its only fault is the distortion. That in the end is the killer.

I could overlook the distortion except for one thing. This is a scene you constantly see in New York. To appreciate a photograph of something so common, it has to be not only good but outstanding. This photograph is not outstanding.

A striking image.
The leading lines of building frames and windows lead my eye first to the jet; I then begin to trace around the zigzag, geometric shape tracing the sky marked by the top of the buildings.
The red engine cowlings are a perfect contrast to the blue sky.
The barrel distortion mention by others isn't so much a detraction to me; in a way, it suggests an echo of the elliptical shape of the airliner's fuselage.
Depending your taste, tastefully adding (your own) clouds to the image might help draw (and re-draw) the eye to the plane...

Thanks,
Stan Matsui

It's a striking image, and the barrel distortion doesn't bother me at all (unlike Alex). I think it probably was shot with a fisheye lens, though it may have been cropped a little; I don't know why Alex thinks it wasn't. I've never seen a zoom with THAT much barrel distortion!

One thing that does bother me about the image is that it looks to me like the plane was edited in digitally. The sun seems to be very low behind the photographer and a bit to his left, to judge from the shadows on the buildings and the fact that the street-facing side of the buildings on the left are not illuminated, while those on the right side are. Yet the plane shows illumination on the right-hand side, not the left. A picture like this that was a legitimate, un-touched-up capture would be a memory of a striking moment, but it's just trivial fakery if you edit in something that reality did not see fit to provide.

i think the barrel effect adds to the shot, giving a good sense of constriction; as in city life and up above the great escape away from the city; the plane.
Excellent work,

A nice example of timing & capturing the moment. The fish-eye effect works very well adding curvature to the towers which further lead the viewers' eye to the subject

I agree that a crop of the bottom part would be welcome. Very good exposure balance between the light and dark areas (buildings and especially the plane). Regarding the barrel distortion, I think it goes well with the subject. It tells (at least to a photographer) that you feel squeezed by that crowd of giants and your escape is the fish-eye. On the other hand, if you use a fish-eye, the plane should be much smaller, considering that is at least 300 ft above the ground. Now, if the plane was edited/inserted it makes the difference from a good picture to a ordinary fake.

The first cut I got on this image was that it felt very commercial. Maybe it is because of so many airline ads that have used this sort of perspective over the years. I think the addition--and I do mean addition--of the plane took a rather ordinary diagonal fisheye shot and gave it a little bit more strength. Flopping the plane could have been easily done and the obvious placement would have been a bit less obvious. A plane over New York City is always going to add some edge to an image. (I believe that airspace is actually closed to airplanes these days)

I know many don't like "faked" shots but it is so pervasive today in advertising especially and even in much of what is being done in fine art photography. In a sense it is probably to be expected as it is one of the bi products of the digital photography age--where it has become very simple to embellish images or to mold them into something new. Here I might say that without the plane the image would have been pretty uninteresting and fairly cliche. The plane adds an edge to it, although as I said earlier is reminiscent of a lot of work done in the advertising world. The mistake was not correcting the light direction.

The basic technical details all seem to be well done other than the attention to the direction of the light.

First impression is that of an interesting composite. The plane seems too large relative to the buildings to be a traditional UWA or FE capture. As other's have mentioned, the image would benefit by cropping the bottom. I rather like the concept, I feel placement of the plane might be a bit too far forward in the image space, but that's my personal opinion. Exposure on the structures is handled very well, a good balance has been struck between highlight and shadow areas. The portrait orientation makes the image stronger, it reminds me of the many times I've craned my necked skyward walking through the city. Other's have mentioned the orientation of the lighting relative to the plane and the structures-in looking at the hard shadows on the building to the right, and how the nose of the aircraft is lit, it seems close enough to work. It really doesn't scream out in my mind as being obviously wrong. I think it has some potential commercial appeal as an image for Stock Agencies, beyond that-not sure.

Thanks to all for your comments......
my contribution to photography
The best thing is the feeling that the buildings surrounding the plane.
Guided sight lines of the builders go directly to the aircraft, the undisputed star of the photo.
worst:
some halos produced by the contrast of light between the sky and buildings. Try to fix the maximum but it was almost impossible

Thanks to all for your comments......
my contribution to photography
The best thing is the feeling that the buildings surrounding the plane.
Guided sight lines of the builders go directly to the aircraft, the undisputed star of the photo.
worst:
some halos produced by the contrast of light between the sky and buildings. Try to fix the maximum but it was almost impossible

This image really works, the lens distortion, the plane frozen in the sky. All super. The only thing I would like to see the lower portion cropped but not a fault. Harmony and balance well executed. Congrats on pow.

POWERFUL!

The convergence seems to add to the image, seeming to "point" to the plane.

Thanks for sharing,

Richard

This is a wonderful photo. My question is, has it been manipulated? It is very surprising to me to see an aircraft flying at such low altitude over skyscrapers.

I like the aesthetic - despite the barrel distortion. It's a very different take on New York. It certainly caught my eye. But I do think this has been manipulated. If you download the image and enlarge the plane 400% you can see all kinds of artifacts that shouldn't be there, including some blue sky color that does not match the rest of the image. The photographer never claimed the image wasn't manipulated. So if I view this POW as a digital alteration, I'd say "well done."
Cheers ~
Alberta

After a closer look I can see what Diana and Alberta see. The plane is too low in relation to the buildings, creative though and still interesting.

When I first saw this shot, I thought "wow! cool shot, right place, right time".
Then as I discovered its possibility as a fake, (convincing evidence there, Alberta P.) I became a little disappointed.
Did it become less worthy as POW? Was the aim to have it pointed out as a fake?
For those, like me, who didn't immediately ID it as being manipulated, I feel it has been a useful learning exercise.
I learned about the direction of light on objects, the barrel distortion of various lenses, and even about the restricted air space over NYC.
I guess if I ever decided to fake a pic in future, I know some of the pitfalls to avoid.
So, in terms of a learning exercise, an excellent choice for this POW.

Dear Friends
Talk about fraud?
the pictures are not handled consistently?
digitally treated to improve
this is what I have done with this picture.
First I imagine a composition, I do two takes and the result is what you get.
I never said or mentioned that it was a direct photo.
Photo occurred to me watching a plane pass over Manhattan. What we decided to broaden the plane to give more effect to the photo
And this is a fraud??
No, it is a creation of an idea
what matters is the resulting picture, not the process to obtain it.
even light is altered, that's also fraud?
Best Regards

To some, "digitally treated to improve" to this extent is an oxymoron. This is the reason why the first question often asked by the photo-appreciative but non-photographing public is "Is it real?" If only the culture of technology could make a commonly accepted distinction between "photography" and "digital artistry," many of the problems and much of the discontent some (but not all) people have with this issue would disappear. Unfortunately, the connection between the endpoints of photography with no manipulation (I know, some would consider that an oxymoron as well) and digital artistry is smooth and continuous with no sharp line of demarcation.