Red Hook Gantries, Summer Afternoon

Red Hook Gantries, Summer Afternoon

I'm always attracted to the bold forms of gantry cranes as a photo motif, whether in
the Port of Baltimore, at the Seagirt Marine Terminal (*), or in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

While I'd first shot the Red Hook gantries from the Downtown New York Heliport in Lower Manhattan with choppers and maritime traffic in the harbor for foreground interest in 2013 (**), a steamy day in late June 2014 brought my first visit to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade - and with it, a new perspective on those colorful gantries.

It was a broiling, July-or-August-worthy afternoon with billowing cumulus rising from the harbor horizon. Despite the summery haze, my 75-300mm lens was providing some interesting tele-compression opportunities when shooting across the harbor toward the Statue of Liberty (***) , or upriver at the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, but it was also fun to zoom downstream from the southern end of the Promenade toward those colorful gantries at Red Hook.

This shot, at 210mm on the crop-sensor camera I was using, actually gives the perspective of 336mm in full-frame (or 35mm film) terms. That also accounts for the promenade fence in foreground not being sharp.

BTW, I can't think of Red Hook without flashing back to a scene in "Analyze This" where Chazz Palminteri, as mobster Primo Sindone, is talking to his sidekick about certain unfortunates being "fed to the crabs off Red Hook." Of course, these days, Red Hook has IKEA and other "gentler" connotations. But I'm sure those crabs are still there by the docks!

©2019 Steve Ember
(*)