This is a photo of a place called the Pink Mansion, built by artist/filmmaker/musician Julian Schnabel in Greenwich Village.
All I could really remember about it just before I posted this on my Facebook page was that it was called the Pink House, or maybe not.
Lots of times I just shoot but never really remember where I was or what I’m shooting. It just looked cool at the time and I had ‘a vision’.
I posted this because I think it looks pretty cool with that crazy sky but not without torturing the crap out of the pixels.
I was on another rooftop a few blocks away and exposed for the building. The sky was crazy blown out. So in Lightroom, I made a virtual copy and pulled the exposure way down. I had now idea that the clouds looked so dramatic. OK, I did when I took the shot but looking at the file, I just didn’t remember. I imported both images into Photomatix and did a default ‘blend’, NOT HDR. That’s because, almost always, HDR sucks.
Then I brought it into Perfect Effects 8, a program I ONLY use to add just a pinch of punch through contrast adjustment. After that, I brought it into NIK Analog Effects Pro.
This is such a cool program. It simulates just how crappy prints from old-style negatives could be. But boy, did they have character. Luckily, you can dial down the crappy and keep the character, which is what I did. Finally I left a little warmth to the image because sometimes I do that. But another influence of my post processing here is from an amazing ‘analog’ photographer and print maker named Nitsa Malik. See her stuff on Facebook here, www.facebook.com/photosbyNitsa
So that it, Greenwich Village, the Pink Mansion and tortured pixels.
And as always, please help me keep this site alive by browsing through my ebooks or photo galleries of beautiful New York City black and white photography. There you can select a gorgeous high-resolution print file that you can download for only $20 and print it anywhere yourself. And I’ll donate 20% of the purchase price to one of the following global humanitarian charities that you can select on checkout: UNESCO, Unicef, Earthwatch, Doctors without Borders, Human Rights Watch and The Hunger Project
Until next time, happy shooting.
Bob