This shot was an attempt to capture the mood of a New York City Street at night. Of course, this began as a color photo, but as I started playing around with various levels of processing, I quickly realized that the situation almost demanded that it be processed as black and white.

The actual black and white processing was a continual experiment in trying to get the contrast of the scene so that it felt right to my eyes. I really liked the steam coming up out of the manhole cover and the headlights (especially how they were reflected in the steam), and I liked the light reflected off the lines of cars on both sides of the street, so I did my best to bring focus to all of these things.

On a higher level, while I’ve always been interested in black and white photography, I find myself drawn more and more in that direction with most of my photos. There’s a subtlety to the gradations of light that I’m finding more and more appealing than a lot of the highly saturated colors I’ve been focusing on for the past year or so.

We’ll see how that plays out long-term, I guess.