This is one of my favorite photographs from my week in New York with Jay Maisel. About a block away from Jay’s “bank” (studio/gallery/home) at on Bowery is Prince Street with this beautiful painted wall. It’s a classic stage opportunity – where you stand across the street, setup for the shot and wait for the actors to appear.
In this case, these two were walking at each other. I waited to snap the image until they had crossed and captured this image. I love how they’re positioned – with the gestures of the guy on the right with his headphones, the lovely light coming down the wall, and the rich color of the whole scene.
Shot with my Fujifilm X-T1 – processed in Lightroom 5.
In his street photography workshop, Jay Maisel stresses “go for the gesture over the graphics” when shooting images. Light and color are important – but most of the street photography we think of as “among our best” have some powerful gesture as part of them.
This image is an example. I shot this on the way to lunch at Katz’s Deli on Houston Street the second day of Jay’s workshop. We were walking up a relatively narrow street when we came upon this construction site. What caught my eye was the triangular wire shape hanging down from a crane. But what makes this picture powerful is the construction worker pointing directly at me with his finger. He wasn’t happy with me – and it came across with this initial gesture!
Of all of the nearly 2,000 images I came home with following the workshop, this is one of the best gesture images – and also the only one that I recall upsetting the subject as I was taking the picture!
Shot with my Fujifilm X-T1 – processed in Lightroom 5.
Here’s an image I’m using to make a point – if you’re doing street photography, you might want to think about wearing an all black outfit. At last week’s Jay Maisel workshop, we briefly discussed this – Jay wears black shirts constantly.
For street photography, you’ll sometimes find yourself in the image – such as me in this image of a Chinatown Cafe early in the morning. You can see my reflection – especially my white hat! – just above the cook himself. I had a black jacket on – which you can also see – but it’s much more subdued than that white hat!
I’ll be shopping soon enough for a black version of my favorite hat!
Shot with my Fujifilm X-T1 and processed in Lightroom 5.
After lunch on the second day of the Jay Maisel Workshop – at Katz’s Deli – we walked down some of the nearby streets. On one of them this crew was working on painting the wall – here’s a closer up version of the woman while the man was ducked behind the front cover doing something else.
Shot with my Fujifilm X-T1, post-processed in Lightroom 5.
I’ll remember the setting for this image for a long time! Doug Kaye and I were up in midtown and, after doing some fun shooting in Bryant Park, headed into the New York Public Library.
There’s a small cafe just off the main lobby of the library. We needed to rest our legs and drink some cool water to rejuvenate ourselves for more midtown walking. Just ahead of us – at a nearby table – was this young woman. She was patiently waiting – and watching – the comings and goings in the lobby.
We both tried shooting her – Doug from the side and me from behind. Once in a while she’d turn her head and I’d get lucky with a capture like this one. Why didn’t we talk to her?
Shot with my Fujifilm X-T1 and post-processed in Lightroom 5.
With my friend Doug Kaye, we headed to New York City last week for a five day photography workshop with Jay Maisel. The workshop was truly a life changing experience for me – opening new eyes and providing new ways to see as taught by this 83-year old American treasure! Jay is famous for being a tough critic – but it’s from that criticism that new learning happens and bad habits get eliminated.
I spent the week shooting with my Fujifilm X-T1 – mostly using the Fujifilm XF 55-200mm F3.5-4.8 Zoom Lens (70-300mm equivalent on a standard 35mm camera) – along with occasional iPhone 5s shots. If my X-T1 could talk, it’d share even more about how things changed in my photography.
During our shooting on the streets, we used Jay’s preferred camera settings for street photography: ISO 1600 (which helps the camera take advantage of faster shutter speeds to freeze movement), increased sharpness and increased color saturation in the JPEGs.
Jay also brackets exposures when he shoots – with one image properly exposed based on the camera’s meter, one over exposed by one stop and a third underexposed by one stop. It was interesting to see the differences between these images – how often the colors in the image were also affected.
Unfortunately, exposure bracketing isn’t a strong suit for the X-T1. Although the X-T1 is capable of high speed burst shooting at up to 8 frames per second, it isn’t capable of that when choosing exposure bracketing. Rather, the shots take about a second to complete the three images – which often results in movement in the scene. Jay’s Nikon D3S fires off his three bracketed shots in rapid fire fashion – minimizing any movement. I really hope that Fujifilm can provide a firmware update to the X-T1 that enables rapid fire exposure bracketing – that would bring it from “pretty good” to awesome for this kind of street photography!
After trying exposure bracketing on the X-T1 for the first day and a half, I abandoned it – moving instead to film emulation bracketing. In that mode, the X-T1 takes one image and then applies up to three of the Fuji film types supported by the camera – I chose Standard, Velvia, and Black and White with a yellow filter. Nine times out of ten I found the Velvia images the most satisfying of the two color films – but many of the black and whites also looked superb right out of the camera. I didn’t work with them much, however, and Jay’s passion is all about vivid color photography.
With almost 2,000 images to review from the week, I’m slowly working through and posting some of those that seem pretty good to me. You can find them here in this Flickr album. I’d welcome your feedback on any of them!
While walking through the exhibition on Sunday, I captured this image of a portion of it – which, coincidentally, has an image of Three Brothers on the far wall just above the woman’s head. That version is from the 1860’s – here’s my version from a few years ago! Shot with my Fujifilm X-T1 and processed in Lightroom 5.
Here’s an interior shot from a recent visit to Filoli shot with my Fujifilm X-T1.
Filoli is such an amazing place – beautiful gardens and the amazing house – all set on an incredible piece of real estate just south of Crystal Springs reservoir.
A few days ago I published another version of this image shot at Filoli with my Fujifilm X-T1. It was somewhat unsatisfying to me – not sure why but it just was.
After asking my friend Doug Kaye for his thoughts, I worked on it again in both Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CC – working to remove a couple of branches in the middle that I thought distracted from the “tunnel effect” of the composition. I also, learning from Doug’s feedback, used some dodging and burning to adjust the contrast selectively in various areas of the image – trying to improve the sense of dimensionality.
I think this one is better – but I’ve decided to set it aside for now and will likely come back to it again with another try!
Here’s another image shot with my Fujifilm X-T1 of the central garden area at Filoli.
We were walking back to head home when I noticed the wheelbarrow in the lovely light. I processed this in Lightroom 5 with a touch of dodging and burning done in Photoshop CC.
You must be logged in to post a comment.