View from Top of the Rock

The forth time in New York, it was the first time I discovered Top of the Rock observation deck. I have to admit that I enjoyed it far more then Empire State Building top floor, probably because it is several stores lower, so you don’t look down on the neighborhood buildings so much, and it is nicely situated for the view of Central Park, which is hidden in the view from Empire State Building.
It was a really bright day when we went there. I was handholding this HDR at f/14, and still got 1/320 for the middle exposure. I wanted to get as much of the skyline in focus as possible, but left my 18-200 mm lens in the hotel room- and the 30 mm prime (on cropped sensor works for 50 mm) did not have smaller aperture! But I think it was provided sufficient depth of field. I also decided to use HDR blending to retain details in the buildings and in the clouds, but 5 images turned out to be not enough, and I still needed help of “old school” grad filter in Lightroom when I post-processed it.
I think I was still successful in showing the layers of the light, the difference between the darkest foreground buildings, and getting lighter and less contrasty lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge in the background. I was also fascinated by the yellowish tint of the sky on the border between it and the water of the East River, another reason I took the photograph from this particular point.