You might think it’s difficult to find fault with one of the most well-known city views in the world, but I have and it’s the Verizon building at 375 Pearl Street. The NYC skyline is a beautiful arrangement of modern, gothic, art deco skyscrapers… and then, towering over the Brooklyn bridge is the tremendous, glowing neon “Verizon” logo. The building has changed hands a few times and hopefully this eyesore’s days are numbered.

But one great aspect of photography is that nothing outside the frame exists, so I thought it might be a fun challenge to get an interesting photo of a building I detest. I think this result isn’t bad.

Of course I didn’t say it was 100% possible, but with an agreement to proceed I offered to scout each location so I can see the buildings through the viewfinder.
This is what I had in mind and successfully did. I’ve been thinking about doing panoramic photography for a long time and this was a chance to buy that nice panoramic head for one of my tripods and experiment with stitching.

Many wide angle lenses are affected by distortion that causes lines to balloon out in the center of the frame and converge near the edges; the client did not want their building to look like it was leaning over. To solve this problem Paul carefully chose his vantage point and shot a series of frames that were later stitched together in Photoshop. He set himself up on the rooftop of another building half the height of his subject and proceeded to photograph the building in pieces. The end result has definitive vanishing points, straight lines, and looks fantastic.