Meatpacking District

I recently took part in a street photography workshop held in the Meatpacking District, which is another one of New York's formerly unattractive commercial districts that has been transformed into a hip neighbourhood. It used to be warehouses but now it's trendy restaurants and boutiques, with not much sign of its previous life. I imagine that the renovation of the High Line has sent the hipness factor through the roof. It also seems that some of the street artists who used to set up shop in Union Square moved here after they were kicked out by Bloomberg.

Shades

This gentleman is one of the former Union Square vendors, I used to see him there all the time when I was walking through on my way to work. This one was easy, everyone was taking a photo.

Smoke

I asked this guy if I could take his photo and he wanted to know what attracted my attention (the hat). Of the photos I took of him this came out looking the most unposed. He said he was going to be giving a concert on the High Line after he finished his cigarette.

Practice

Cheerleaders practicing on a street corner. A minute after I took this they packed up and left. 

On duty

A parking building security guard. For some reason the interior was a lot more colourful than your usual parking building!

Repose

Debriefing after the workshop. This is exactly the kind of lighting where I find getting the white balance right tricky, but this is more-or-less how it looked to the naked eye.

The workshop was pretty informative, and I picked up some courage to ask strangers for photos. The downside was that it's hard to get a clear shot when you're in a group of 20 photographers! Of course, I will have to go back on my own sometime.

Around Chinatown

A few more photos from my recent exploration of Chinatown with the Nikon N80. 

Antique

This cigar store Indian seemed to be on duty outside an antique shop, rather than at his usual post.

The stairs sing

At attention

It wouldn't be a trip to Chinatown without a fish photo ...

Suspended in space (1)

Suspended in space (2)

I took a couple of versions of this photo with the N80 but they didn't come out that well, I had a hard time getting the exposure right and overall it seems livelier with colour (taken with the D7000). I got the composition better in the colour photo as well, but I had the luxury of a much wider angle to work with.

This laundry looks convincing but it's all fake: it was suspended between two anonymous-looking buildings with no sign of human habitation, separated by an empty alley. It attracted plenty of attention -- I wasn't the only photographer! One Chinese guy said to me, "Like Shanghai". Later another guy explained to me that someone had been shooting a film, which sounds convincing. The first time I walked by a group of workmen were backing a big orange construction vehicle into the alley so I got out of the way and came back again later. Since it had an arm to raise a platform up I assume it was intended to take down the fake laundry, and it turned out I was lucky to get the photo -- when I came back the next weekend it was all gone.

Dusk

Some photos I've taken on the way home from work at around the time the sun starts to go down:

Monolith

Not quite a silhouette of an apartment building, but getting close. Taken from the Highline overlooking the Hudson River.

Circles and lines

This is just a fence next to a building, but the orange sunlight created an interesting contrast with the blueish metal.

Clouds

Skyline

Not taken on the way back from work, but it fits the overall theme. I took this one as the last of the sunlight was disappearing, with a typical New York skyline in silhouette.

Lines

This is a photo that I took a few months ago but only just rediscovered, tight framing to simplify the image really paid off.

Lines with sky

Nikon N80

For a while I've had a feeling that while a digital camera is certainly very convenient, it makes it all too easy to take photos without really concentrating on taking good photos. All to often I find myself taking a photo and then retaking it multiple times to improve it based on what I see in the LCD. That produces a lot of photos, and I still might not get a good photo since I focus on one thing at a time that needs to be fixed and forget about the big picture. For instance, I've often taken photos that I thought are well-composed, but have a crooked horizon. This shoot-and-refine cycle has another side-effect of increasing the number of photos I have to look through on my computer, and I don't really like spending more time than necessary doing that.

Thinking about what to do about this, I came to the conclusion that it might be worth trying film, since you can get a reasonable second-hand film camera fairly cheap nowadays. It's been at least 7 years since I last had a film camera and back then the cost of developing put me off using it much -- which is more of an advantage than a disadvantage for getting into a mindset of taking fewer photos. After thinking long and hard about it I bought a used Nikon N80 for about $90 a few weeks ago. The heavier, professional-level F100 is certainly attractive but at $250 it seems like an extravagance at this stage. With the 50mm f/1.8 lens I'd already bought for the D7000 and a roll of Kodak T-Max 100 film I was ready to go.

I set a goal of trying to take one photo of whatever caught my eye, and concentrate as much as possible on the composition and what I was including in the frame as I could before pressing the shutter. Taking 36 photos this way proved to be more frustrating than I expected, it took two trips on separate weekends to get through the whole roll! Here are some of the better ones:

Chrome and shadow

I took this photo and the next one on the Upper West Side. This bike caught my eye because I've recently been taking a lot of photos of reflected scenes, though in this one the reflection doesn't really come through except in the chrome at the bottom, which isn't really the focus. I took another photo with more chrome but this one turned out to be more interesting.

Luxury

This is one of the grand apartment buildings along West End Avenue. The tones came out much better than I was expecting, I was pleasantly surprised.

Solitude 

6th Avenue around 50th Street, where Midtown changes into corporate office buildings. I was drawn to the solitary guy sitting behind the fountain, but he is too small to really be a focus of attention. I wanted to have the lines parallel to the top and bottom edges of the frame but that would have put the man too close to the fountains of water.

Public art

Or maybe corporate art. The tones of the reflected light drew my attention here. I spent a long time in front of it trying to figure out how to frame it in a pleasing way.

Columbus Park

Chinatown is another one of the places that I go to when I can't think of what I want to photograph, since there's always something to see. This time I visited some parts I hadn't been to before, including Columbus Park, which was crowded with Chinese people on a Sunday. This game attracted a crowd of spectators, I waited for a while before I was able to get a clear shot of the guy concentrating on the board. The baseball cap wearer in the foreground was a distraction but there wasn't really any other way to take it.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with the results and I'll definitely do it again, though I'll use T-Max 400 next time so that I can get a faster shutter speed. The tones on some of the photos are amazing, and the prints I got at Grand Photo Solutions have very nice contrast (I put the scans up here, which aren't as contrasty, but I increased the contrast a bit so they approximate the prints to an extent). The N80 is a very easy-to-use camera, since it's film there's much fewer settings to worry about and it's much lighter than the D7000 (of course a 50mm lens doesn't add much weight either). Filters complicate the picture a bit but for carefully composed shots it seems like it's going to be worth the effort. I don't foresee it displacing the digital camera, though! (aside from general convenience, it seems like it will be hard to reconcile it with the error-prone process of taking photos of people, though maybe that will come with more practice).

Soho

Soho is one of the places in Manhattan where there's nearly always something interesting to photograph. One Friday after work I went out with my 50mm lens to see what I would come across.

Mirror

The whole frame here is a single storefront with a reflective glass window, the duplicated woman on the right edge of the frame is on the edge between two of the panels.

Staying connected

Taxi

Snack while on duty 

Reflected

My favourite from the whole set. I took a couple of versions of this scene but this is the one where the elements came together the best. Soho is one of the rare neighbourhoods where the back streets are still cobbled, and I was lucky that it rained earlier in the day.

Central Park, Belvedere Castle

I went to Belvedere Castle in Central Park for the first time a few weeks ago after living in New York for more than five years, and the surroundings turned out to be a surprisingly good place to take photos!

Belvedere Castle 

The castle. Unfortunately it was a cloudy day, which accounts for the white sky, I will stick to the "don't include the sky on cloudy days" advice in the future!

Dark inside

Contemplation

Light and dark

This photo didn't turn out so well (I don't like the motion blur in the middle) but the composition and tones are better than all the others I took in the same place (the underside of a particularly ornate bridge). I'll definitely be back to have another go at this one.

Extra: I took these photos, and the ones in the last few blog posts, with the Nikon D7000 I  bought in April. Overall I'm very pleased with it compared to the Olympus E-520, though to be fair, it's 2 years newer and at the high end of Nikon's consumer cameras, unlike the E-520. Things that I'm particularly appreciating that the Olympus lacks include the button + command dial settings for ISO and white balance, wide selection of lenses (I am enjoying the 18-200mm superzoom), higher usable ISO, plenty of focus points, lower noise and wider dynamic range. I'm still using the Olympus from time to time, but the Nikon is now my main camera.

Bleecker Street

Some photos from a walk down the East Side to the eastern end of Bleecker Street a few weekends ago. The first one is from Irving Place, an orphaned length of Lexington Avenue that runs between Gramercy Park and 14th Street.

Chops seafood

Noho Star

Two sides to every story

This looks like a trick photo but it isn't: this is a triangular building next to the Bleecker Street subway station that houses a very narrow restaurant. The next two photos show it from different sides.

Some marathons end ...

Off duty

I had intended to emphasise what's going on in the foreground here, but the taxi drivers in the background inevitably draw the eye.

Gowanus Canal, continued

Here are some more of the photos I took around the Gowanus Canal back in April. Unlike the previous set these don't really have a common theme, just things that caught my eye.

Forgotten

I found these pallets stacked under a platform at the back of a disused-looking warehouse facing the canal, looking like they'd been left there by a previous owner quite some time ago.

Reflected crane

Propeller

All the same

Fire escapes

I tried photographing this in a couple of different ways but it didn't come out quite the way I intended, I was hoping to capture the "suspended in space" feeling but I didn't really pull it off. Maybe the framing is too tight?