Finding The Right Angle

Anybody want to guess where this is at? Or what I was doing to shoot it? Anyone? Anyone? I didn't think so. When I shot this picture, I was lying flat on my back in the lobby of Rockefeller Center in NYC. 30 Rock, I guess you could say. This is a Swarovski crystal chandelier that's three stories tall, and I'm lying under it shooting up. You can see the nearby crystals are blurry and spread apart, but the ones up nearer the top are in focus and much closer together. I thought it was a great angle to get a unique picture of something impressive.

The different colors in this shot are just light refracting in the crystals. I think it was lit with all white light, which the crystals fragmented into all the colors of the rainbow. You can see more of that in the shot below.


And finally, this would be the shot taken by most tourists. You can see the spiral stairway that wraps around the piece. I think this is where we left the building after visiting Top Of The Rock, which gives you a great view of the Empire State Building up the street, but not much else. Well, at least at night. I suppose during the day you could see Central Park to the north, but at night it's just a black blob. The million dollar night-time view is from the Empire State.