File:Winter sunsets, Jan 2010 - 04.jpg

(more details later, as time permits)

As I pointed out in the comments for an earlier sunset photo (see "A mediocre sunset is better than no sunset at all"), the weather here in New York has been really frigid during this first week of January, 2010. Partly because of that, and partly because the sun is way far south on the horizon, we've had some spectacular sunsets in recent days. Unfortunately, they only last for a few minutes; you're either out there, ready to photograph, or you're not.

If I were leading the life of leisure that I'd prefer, then I'd set aside an hour each afternoon, and just watch the progress of the sun and sky -- or better yet, I would mount my camera on a tripod, and haul it up to the roof of our apartment building to watch the sun set across the entire panorama of the southward-facing view that I've got of Manhattan and the Hudson River (here's an example of what that panorama looks like). But it doesn't usually work that way; instead, I'm usually in my office, staring at boring, work-related trivia on my computer screen, and my wife yells at me from the kitchen, "... wow, that's a really great sunset tonight!"

On two such recent occasions, the temperature was bone-chilling cold as usual, but the wind wasn't quite as blustery. While the light was changing fairly rapidly, I had enough time to take a few dozen separate 5-image handheld HDR composite photos. I was able to balance the camera on the railing of our apartment terrace, and I figured that would make it stable enough that I could ratchet down the ISO setting to a mere 800 -- low enough, hopefully, to eliminate some of the noise that would otherwise have been quite visible. And I had a chance to try out a new Nikon 14-24 wide-angle lens provided a much wider panorama than I'm usually able to capture...

Only a few of the resulting HDR composites were worth keeping at all, but I'm leaving town in a few minutes for a week's vacation in the (hopefully much warmer!) Caribbean ... so I've decided to keep these new images, just like the earlier "mediocre sunset; attempt). Hopefully I'll get some better ones as the year goes on...

Note: This is one of 12 photos that I've culled from several thousand that I took in 2009, for possible presentation at a Jan 2010 class I'm taking at the International Center of Photography (ICP), called "On Seeing What's Right In Front of You." The photos already exist in various other Flickr sets -- often just one or two out of a group of hundreds of related images -- and I've just pulled them together for this occasion.

In the spirit of the ICP class title, all of these photos were taken "right in front" of where I live -- i.e., within a hundred feet of my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.