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Photos Turn Into Paintings at Greenburgh Town Hall

GREENBURGH, N.Y. — Photographer Joy Malone waited for her senior visitors to get out of the bus in front of the Greenburgh Town Hall, then guided them into the Madeleine Gutman gallery, where her works are exhibited.

“Beautiful,” said Pat Tubiolo as she entered the corridor and looked at the walls. “There’s a lot of colors.”

Tubiolo, 92, was one of the 11 seniors from Yonkers' Sunrise Senior Living who came to see Malone’s pictures Monday morning at the Town Hall.

Malone selected two collections for this exhibition, her first solo show. “New York City at Night” includes pictures of the city’s landmarks, such as Bryant Park, Grand Central and Times Square, while “America Dream” depicts suburbia houses and streets, all with an exuberance of colors and details.

“I thought they were paintings,” a senior said.

A Cannon 20D camera hanging on her shoulder, Malone explained her technique to the visitors.

“I shoot multiple exposures of the scene, them I superimpose them and choose the exposure I want,” she said.

By exposure, Malone meant the time the camera allows light to reach its image sensor. A longer exposure is needed to capture the details of a dark scene. On the other side, long exposures causes moving objects to appear blurred, and can make the illuminated parts of the scene too bright.

Malone takes different pictures with exposures that go from a fraction of a second to a couple of minutes and uses Photoshop to combine them, picking from each one its best features.

“You can’t get these pictures with just one exposure,” she said. “Because there are just too many details in the lights and in the shadows.”

She pointed to a picture of a train dashing through brownstone buildings. The sky over them was dark and cloudy in some spots, and blue and shiny in others.

“In the original picture, the entire sky was white,” she said.

It was the same multiple-layers method that made a taxi look hazy in a picture featuring the New York Times building. The image brought some old memories to Tubiolo’s mind.

“I worked in downtown for seven months,” she said. “They look nice now, but during the day they are like bees running around.”

Malone studied photography at St. John’s University, where she teaches today, and later earned a Master’s from San Francisco’s Academy of Art University. She has a daughter and lives in New Rochelle. Her pictures will be displayed at the Greenburgh Town Hall until Nov. 11. 

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