Stone versus sky

Inside the fortress of Rumeli Hisar.

Sense of scale

Another shot of the Glenwood Power Plant in Yonkers. It really is gigantic, it's no wonder it was left deserted for all these years.

Russia in Brooklyn

I wasn't expecting to see an Orthodox church while walking from Williamsburg to Greenpoint!

The Dome

Adventures in wide angles. I like the curves, but I think the blue and orange really make the shot.

Above Osaka (and second-hand camera stores)

At the top of the Umeda Sky Building. I'm not sure if the security guard realised that I was taking photographs of him, but he very obligingly stayed still.

Since one of the most frequently-visited posts on this blog is the one I wrote about a second-hand camera store in Kobe, I figure that there may be some use to somebody in reporting on the second-hand camera stores I went to in Osaka. If you're a photographer and you find yourself in Kobe wanting to buy some equipment, you should really head to Osaka since there's a much wider selection.

Yodobashi Camera across the street from JR Umeda station needs no introduction from me, but they don't sell second-hand equipment (even so, you should pay a visit if you haven't been to a really big Japanese camera store before). Fortunately there are at least three used camera stores in the vicinity. Across the street from Yodobashi Camera there are branches of the two main Osaka camera store chains, Camera no Kitamura and Camera no Naniwa. They're practically next to each other and both of them are on the second floor of the buildings they're located in (look for their names in Japanese, キタムラ and ナニワ). Right next to JR Umeda station itself is Yaotomi Camera, which is the biggest of the three and has a very large selection of second-hand equipment on display. Unfortunately a map isn't much help finding it since it's in the basement of a building next to the station, but you can get to it if you go the station's South Building and then follow signs for the subway Midosuji Line. Take the stairs down to the basement, Yaotomi Camera will be on your left.

I also went down to Nanba, and ended up finding a Nikon FE2 at what seemed like a reasonable price at the Camera no Kitamura in the basement of the Nanba City building. Once again the map is a bit misleading, assuming you took the Midosuji Line down from Umeda, when you get off you'll find yourself in front of the north entrance to JR Namba station. Walk around to the east side of the station and then walk south until you find the Nanba City building on your right (なんばCITY). It's split in two by a road, go into the South Building and go down to the basement and you'll find the store. It isn't really that different from the one in Umeda, but since I found the camera I was looking for there cheaper than elsewhere (12,000 yen) I may as well mention it.

Umeda Sky Building

The Umeda Sky Building is about 10 minutes on foot from JR Umeda Station (when you know where you're going; I asked at the information desk at the station but then got lost along the way). From the roof you can get a panoramic view of Osaka, but the building it self is quite interesting too. I took this photo from inside some public artwork underneath the arch of the building, and framed it to try and exploit the circles and triangles.

Science fiction

This makes me think of the spaceships on the covers of the science fiction books I sometimes read as a kid. Looks to me like it's about to take off and fly away somewhere far.

Old versus new

Reflection or shadow?

Walking up Fifth Avenue late in the afternoon, the shadow of St Patrick's Cathedral in a neighbouring building caught my eye.

Lots left to do

Look up!

The Cloisters

Last weekend I made a trip up to the Cloisters at the north end of Manhattan for the first time in a while. I'm always looking for chances to add a frame to a photo, here I was lucky to get two in one.

Gramercy Park

The entrance to an apartment building near Gramercy Park provided the subject for this unusual shot. I can't really imagine anyone decorating their building with something like this nowadays.

Sinister figures

Dusk, Madison Square Park

For the first few after I moved to New York I felt pretty claustrophobic whenever I was outside, Manhattan buildings have a way of towering over you when you're not used to them. Here's a stab at recreating that feeling:

Canyons of New York

Fire escapes

Just something that happened to catch my eye on the way to work. There's something I find fascinating about fire escapes, as I was trying to capture in an earlier photo.

Clouds and fire escapes

Door

The door of a boutique clothing store in Soho. Looks like it's been through a lot.

Weathered

Wide angles

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been experimenting with the wide end of my zoom lens recently. When I'm walking around talking photos I use a 50mm-equivalent lens most of the time, switching to the zoom when I need a longer focal length, but I haven't really been using the wider angles much until now. Lately I'm trying out shooting at 18mm, with three separate aims in mind: capturing converging lines, getting a greater feeling of perspective, and increasing the size and impact of foreground objects relative to the background. With lots of tall buildings in New York, converging lines are the easiest!

Skyscraper

Convergence

More wide angle shots to come!

Series

Something that caught my eye on Astor Place this weekend. I'd noticed this building before but it was the first time I really stopped to take a proper look at it.

Receding reflection

East Midtown

Last Sunday I took a stroll around the east part of Midtown (40th-50th Streets) to see what I could find to photograph. Since I am trying to take fewer, better photographs recently I ended up taking not that many, these are a few of the better ones.

Autumn leaves in Spring

Earlier in the day I'd been reading a photography book that had a section on taking autumn photographs so I was surprised and happy to find this rather confused tree in a little garden at the foot of a skyscraper. Looking at it you'd think it was September and not the middle of May! Following what I'd been reading I took the shot from below to get backlighting and increased the exposure so that the leaves didn't come out too dark compared to the white, cloudy sky. I would have preferred a blue sky but you can't have everything -- next time maybe?

In between 

East River Drive

In the 50s there's a series of dead-end streets that overlook over East River Drive. I went down 52nd Street, which is lined with very swanky old apartment buildings, and found this view of the river and Queens on the far side.

Brooklyn Bridge through the mist

Taken from the same place, looking south towards Brooklyn Bridge, though in this shot I zoomed in to exclude the uninteresting stuff.

First post

I'm an amateur photographer in New York. I've owned a succession of point-and-shoots but after being vaguely dissatisfied with their results for a long time I finally bought a digital SLR this year, it's completely changed my attitude to photography! I can finally get the kind of results I've been hoping for in tricky photography conditions. I seem to be naturally drawn to the more technical aspects of photography but I'm starting to lean more about composition and searching for more interesting things to photograph.

I'm planning to use this blog to post stuff that I've learnt and how I'm putting it into practice. I'll attach a couple of recent photos to every post with some technical details and a bit of commentary on how I think they turned out. I take photos with an Olympus E-520 that came with a pair of kit lenses, a basic 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 and a 40-150mm f/4.0-5.6 for more zoom.

The first set of photos are ones I took in New York in April, a few weeks after I got the camera, back when I was still getting the hang of the basics -- somehow I managed to take these at ISO 800!

Blue building, 25mm at f/11

This building caught my eye on the way to work, I like the contrast between the blue of the apartment building and the sky, and the older brick building on the right and its metal chimney. If I took this again I'd try and make the red brick stand out more, here it looks too dark and brown.

West Village, 40mm at f/9

The colours of the buildings and the front of the church are what draw me to this scene but it's more washed out than I was aiming for. Still, I like the contrast between the three rows of buildings in the foreground versus the irregularly-positioned background buildings.

Street scene, 14mm at f/6.3

After hunting for an interesting perspective I found this. Usually I don't have much opportunity to take photos from high up (in New York I seem to take too many photos of the sides of buildings), I'd like to figure out a way of taking more shots like this. I particularly like the parked cars versus the blurred taxi. It was pretty cloudy when I took this shot so I increased the exposure, probably too much since the brick wall is overexposed.