The editors of American Cranes selected this image for the August cover. Walking down a narrow side street in NYC, the white tower crane stood out against the buildings on both sides of the street, drawing the eye to the subject of this month’s issue.
The August edition of American Cranes & Transport features an image of a tower crane that was operating in Germany. Love those clouds!
Attending my fourth Bauma in Munich Germany and shooting for my friends at KHL magazine. It should be interesting both from the magnitude of the show and the fact that I’ll be using the new Nikon Z6 mirrorless body as well as my D5. So far the Z6 has not disappointed and has actually been consistently outperforming my expectations. Bauma is the largest equipment trade show in the world, held every three years at the trade fair grounds outside Munich. Its massive, a sensory overload for any first timer with 3,700 exhibitors from 63 countries spread over 137 acres, 44 of which are enclosed. Attendance is expected to exceed 500,000! Consistent with past shoots I usually arrive two days before the trade show opens and walk the show grounds to get a feel for exhibits and light. This is where the press pass comes in handy. The pre-show activity is nothing less than a frenzy with well over 1,000 forklifts and other equipment as well as thousands of tradespeople racing around and putting the final touches on the exhibits. And like magic, all this activity will be done by Monday morning when the crowds start lining up to enter. This is one of the tower cranes taken with the Z6 and Z 24-70 f4.5 shot in B&W in camera. Just love that ability!
Nikon Z6; Nikon Z24-70f4.5
In shooting the cover for the August issue of American Crane and Transport, I had what I thought was a slam dunk idea for a cover. Literally outside my 16th floor office was a 51 story building going up. I started shooting the building from the time the tower crane was assembled. What a unique shot I thought. Straight down on a Tower Crane, a perspective most people don’t see or get to shoot. Up 2,3,8,12 stories and I shot all the way, along with the conventional from the ground up shot. When it came time to submit, in went the “unique perspective shots” along with the traditional. Then the call came from the editor. “We are really struggling to select one from several we like, would you like to be the tie-breaker?” So I selected my favorites and had a couple of hours to get back to them. In the end, I picked the traditional shot. Why not the “unique perspective”. The image was to highlight the magazine’s lead story, key word “story”. The more I looked at the tower crane below me in the “unique perspective” shots, the more I realized that they just didn’t have the impact of standing under a 12 story tower crane in operation – that’s what your mind expects to see and if it doesn’t see that it doesn’t scream Tower Crane. So in supporting the magazine’s lead story, we needed to make the reader’s mind identify quickly that this was the tower crane issue, not struggle to figure out why we were looking down on the crane. It was an important lesson for me and a reminder that its about telling the story, not just about capturing what was a unique perspective. In the end the story won out, as it should have.
