For this, my second shoot with NY actress Jennifer Berge, we met again on a frigid winter night on East 42nd Street and walked our way toward the Tudor Overpass new the UN. It was about 7:30 PM when we began taking pictures and ineffably was already quite dark.
It wasn't easy deciding between two locations, but I opted for taking pictures at the Tudor Overpass because I already had a picture in mind that I wanted to do in there. So, I positioned my only DSLR with a flip screen and mounted it on a portable stand so I could shoot from a high, wide-angle looking down at Jennifer as she was leaning on the bridge rails. Autofocusing in the dark with any of my cameras is nearly impossible, so I set my camera to zone focusing on infinity and fired some shots. Having had a more stable platform, higher resolution, and a shutter release cable would have work to my advantage, and that's something I will keep in mind for a future attempt when I return to that location with a willing subject.
Having a low success rate with nighttime portraits make me critical about what decisions I take. Getting a picture right out of camera never comes without compromise, and learning to live by that prevents me from getting bored with photography. In this photoshoot, focusing was a serious shortcoming, the autofocus in my camera did not respond, and in some cases, the infrared on my flash trigger failed to connect with my flash. I was forced into manual focusing, which led me to do some guesswork.
I began getting my favorite sequence of pictures about ten minutes after we started. The city lights on the other side of the bridge called out attention, so I fixed my aperture to them wide open to intentionally create colorful, spherical shapes in the background. I held the flash at arm's length slightly over her eye level with its power set at 1/4 with a shutter speed of 125/sec.
