Late afternoon winter sun…
Obviously, I just love low light and cross light pictures. Winter light seems to work best for this because it is cleaner and more golden. When we have this kind of light in the summer, the light gets muddy because of the humidity.
Why?
A little optical lesson.
Water in the air tends to reflect color in the red spectrum. What is humidity? It’s water in the air that isn’t rain. When there is reddish light contrasted against a blue sky, guess what happens? You get a sort of a gray-blue sky. I can clean a lot of that up in post production. But, with exception of really messing with reality as I often do, I try to keep things pretty natural as I saw it. The key phrase is “as I saw it.” Why? No camera lens, sensor or processor can see what the human eye can see. The same thing used to happen in the good old film days.
With my eyes and brain… sheesh. There’s no telling how I see. Nobody knows. Not even me.
Anyway, this is a section of Magazine Street — the longest shopping street in The United States — that is way downriver in The Lower Garden District. I like to wander around Magazine Street but I like this section best. It’s funky and quirky. The people are a little more interesting to me. The cafes and coffee houses are a little more unique.
And one more thing.
I can walk to it from home. That’s more important than you might think. Magazine Street is old. It’s narrow. It wasn’t built for today’s traffic patterns. Between cars that are parked on both sides of the street, bigger vehicles than the street was ever intended for, and more people living Uptown than there have been in recent years, the street is one giant, rolling parking lot. It can take a very long time to get anywhere upriver from our house. There are alternative streets, but often I can’t remember where exactly the place that I’m going to is located, so I have to see it as I drive. I guess that I add to the problem.
Still, it’s Magazine Street and I wouldn’t change it.
Filed under: Color, Colorful, Laskowitzpictures.com, Photographer, Photographing, Photographs, Photography, Pictures, Ray Laskowitz Tagged: Cafes, cars, City, Cityscape, Dusk, Golden Hour, Golden Light, Historical District, Louisiana, Lower Garden District, Magazine Street, Neighborhood, New Orleans, Old, Shopping Street, Shops, Street, Uptown, Urban, Winter Light 
