Visitors to Paul Luther’s home can view 18 miles of the New York City skyline without ever leaving Greenfield.
After searching for his long-lost photography project over the course of five decades, Luther finally unearthed negatives he had taken as a graduate student in 1969, and used modern digital methods to splice them together into a panorama. The finished product, a combination of 20 photos, depicts everything from the George Washington Bridge to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, including the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center not long after its groundbreaking.
“I was in school in New York City and had been experimenting with photography in my free time,” Luther said of how the photos came to be. “My family lived across the river from New York City in New Jersey and I grew up there in Union City. Seeing the New York City skyline was an almost daily event.”
Using a Pentax camera with a 200 mm lens on a tripod, positioned across the Hudson River from Manhattan, Luther carefully took the 20 photos.
While he had assembled the photos into a panorama before now, Luther recounted a significantly different process in 1969. He developed the photos, cut them up and put them together, creating a spliced image to have as “dorm decor” during his first year of graduate school.
Luther noted he also had to keep the same exposure for each photo for consistency, which he explained was a challenge due to the sun moving. When looking at the image, the light on the buildings is brighter on the left side near the George Washington Bridge and as your eyes move to the right, closer to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the buildings get slightly darker.
After his project was complete, Luther put the negatives into a labeled envelope and brought them with him to Massachusetts when he got married. In the 1970s, he searched unsuccessfully to find the envelope again. Luther said he looked for them periodically, but the negatives were nowhere to be found.
After the death of his wife, Valerie, in May 2020 and his retirement as Bernardston town clerk at the end of that year, Luther was looking to stay busy and decided to search for the negatives once again. This time, his search paid off. He found them in July 2022.
“For 50 years I was looking periodically for these negatives,” Luther said.
Luther said he used Photoshop to begin the process of taking all 20 pictures and splicing them digitally.
He scanned the negatives, which he found had scratches on them, mostly visible in the sky. One by one, Luther began editing the scratches out.
Luther then found the Hudson River’s lighting didn’t match with the lights and darks of the buildings. Because of this, Luther edited out the river water so all that remains on the panorama is the buildings and bridges.
“Sometimes you can solve a problem, especially with computers, without necessarily knowing why it’s a problem,” he noted. “And so I said, ‘Wait a minute, what if I just take out the river?’ It’s kind of interesting, but it wasn’t germane to the actual image.”
After Luther finished the digital image, he brought it to Staples for printing. Luther now displays the panorama in his home and invites anyone to see it for themselves.
“You really can’t get an idea of what this is unless you look at it,” Luther said.
To see the panorama, email Luther at valandpaul@55hucklehill.com.