On our long day of street shooting in New York, Doug Kaye and I headed uptown – stopping at Times Square along the way. Mostly, shooting in Times Square was pretty frustrating – way too many people – going this way and that.
But we came upon this construction site – lots of manual work being done in front of this American flag billboard. An appropriate reminder of Memorial Day.
Shot with my Fujifilm X-T1
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
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
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
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!
This past week I attended Jay Maisel’s Workshop for photographers in New York City. Each morning, Jay wanted us up and out shooting before class began. This image is from my first morning out (Tuesday) when I found this wall along Rivington Street which the sun gently kissed as it was coming up.
This image was taken with my Canon PowerShot S100 and processed in Lightroom 5.
Ming Thein recently released a new two part video series on developing style in photography. One of the four styles he discusses is a cinematic style – something he’s known for.
This is an example applying some of his techniques to a 2007 image of mine shot on the steps of the New York Public Library in New York. As I was spinning through my old Lightroom library looking for examples, this woman’s red jacket jumped out at me. The image was shot with a Canon PowerShot S500 – my ever present companion back in those days.
I post processed the image using Lightroom 5, VSCO Film 05 and Photoshop CC.
One of the most useful concepts for street photograph is the idea of finding a stage – a background that’s interesting and appropriate for an image – and then waiting for something unusual to happen like a person walking into the frame.
This technique requires pre-visualizing the scene and then getting the camera prepared. This is often best done by switching to manual mode and prefocusing on either the background – if that’s what you want in focus – or on the area where the person/people might be. It’s your creative choice – but get the camera ready.
Sam Abell, as described by one of the attendees at one of his workshops, described his approach: “A key idea in Sam’s approach is to first identify the background. With a promising background, you then wait for the light and the subject to complete the photograph. … Find the right background, wait for the right light, wait for the right subject, nail the exposure, pay attention to details of micro composition, take the picture.”
I’ve written a number of articles here about images I’ve shot using this notion of stages – you can see them here.
This particular image is inside Radio City Music Hall in New York City – shot with my iPhone 5s. Of course, it’s just a stage – waiting to be filled!
I just finished watching a street photography course that Ming Thein recently published – and have been going back some of my earlier images from visits to New York.
Tonight I came across this image – of a couple in beautiful light on a rock in New York’s Central Park. The original image wasn’t very sharp – shot with my tiny Canon PowerShot S90 – so I opted to exploit the light and textures instead – using a painterly treatment in Photoshop CC along with some other tricks.
I love how the light turned out – and how they’re so present in the image.