This apartment building is across from the Puerto Rican Travelling Theatre, where I had been working on an over-hire gig with a friend of mine.  I liked this facade because it just seemed so not "gentrified."

Way back when I was working on Sheppard's Ghosts, my foray in to the "photo/graphic novel," I had worked my way up to a sequence in the narrative that took place in Manhattan at night. Since I don't have nearly enough images of Manhattan after dark, I was faced with the task of converting something from broad daylight to streetlight.

I think it worked pretty well.

Consider: not only did the light need to be not too light at all - rather it needed to look as if the source were street lights which meant a lot of shadow and a change in direction - BUT the interior of the hallway needed to be lit, too, so the stuff in the door glass would be BACK lit, and the highlights on the buzzer box would, um, reflect that.  PLUS the two guys standing there needed to look as if they were standing under the same street light.  OY. 

I actually had to debate with myself just how much of the facade would get lit, and how much shadowed, and how deep the shadow would be.  It took some time to accept that the really great detail over the door would just have to get buried in gloom.  But that's the way of it.