Date: August 19th, 2012
Time: 6:01 p.m.
Location: New York City
My husband accompanied me to the New York International Gift Fair this past summer: a kind deed that saw him toting boxes, setting up my booth, fetching coffee (repeatedly), and generally dealing with…me. He probably deserves some sort of medal for this.
One such night was the date above, when my day in the Javits Convention Center ended at 6:00 p.m. and I was on a MISSION to capture the Chrysler building before the summer sun sank too low behind the rest of the towering buildings in Midtown Manhattan. Which meant we had about 15 minutes to make it the one-mile trip across the island, just past Bryant Park, to capture the exact angle I knew I needed.
We power walked in the (thankfully) unseasonably cool summer evening, with my husband gazing longingly at all the delicious restaurants we raced past. We ran across streets when we didn’t have the crossing signal (we’d been in New York long enough to know that this is totally acceptable behavior, and in fact NOT doing so marks you as a lame tourist). We wove in and out of leisurely weekend crowds, and we dashed north and skidded to a halt at the spot I wanted.
One solitary light in the building flickered to life as I looked through my lens. The carousel in nearby Bryant Park spun brightly, full of merry children. The lights in the trees and pergolas across the park began to glow brighter in the late summer evening. And, best of all, I had arrived in time.
By the time I shot this particular image, more lights appeared in the upper windows of the building, and the sun finally slipped low enough to call an end to my work for the night. Now, we could finally have dinner and enjoy the hum of the city on a lazy evening under the soft lights and the late summer sky.