I’m at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 50th Street, home of the world-famous Radio City Music Hall. I’ve featured the Music Hall on the blog before, but this is the first time I’ve photographed it in black and white. What do you think?

Monochrome is an unexpected choice, given Radio City’s famous red-and-blue neon signs. Nevertheless, I thought the less colorful treatment would work—and, truth be told, I was using a black-and-white-only camera, so I didn’t exactly have a choice. The vertical framing is also unusual. That was partly out of necessity since my 50mm lens wasn’t wide enough to satisfactorily frame the building horizontally. Despite these atypical photographic choices, I think the picture came out great.

The black-and-white treatment gives the scene a timeless quality, helped by the fact that there aren’t any cars in the frame to reveal when the photograph was made. I really enjoy creating images like this that seem disconnected from a particular era.

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