If you stand in front of the Hard Rock Café at the corner of West 43rd Street and 7th Avenue, in the heart of New York’s Times Square, the US Military Recruiting Centre will be directly across the street. The side of that building sports a US Flag created with what appears to be thousands of multi-coloured LED lights. I watched with fascination as the passing traffic heading south on 7th Avenue reflected the light of the US flag in their windshields. A large tourist bus would pull up to the stop light on 43rd Street every few minutes. If you were quick, you could fire off a few images isolating an abstract pattern combining the lights of the lights making up the US flag and its reflection in the curved windshield of the bus. Having a long-ish zoom (in the full-frame equivalent range of 200-300mm at the long end of the range) made it relatively easy to capture these images from the safety of the sidewalk (no need to run into the middle of the crosswalk). These sorts of small details… images within images (often abstract) fascinate me. Making a habit of paying attention to what is going on inside the scene will often produce more interesting images than the scene itself.
Sometimes, the front of the bus was obscured by traffic beside it; sometimes, a pedestrian would walk in front of the US Flag at an inopportune moment, and sometimes, the bus would pause at the intersection only briefly. But, patience was eventually rewarded with this image. It was, I thought, the best of those from the 20 – 30 minutes spent there that day.
Patience is often rewarded more than not, making it an important quality for all photographers to cultivate.
