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?