Spring has finally arrived in the Big Apple and I'm eagerly looking forward to spending many days out on the street shooting before the weather becomes too beastly hot to be able to take long walks. Hopefully that will be two or three months.
Over the past year of shooting street and reviewing my images, I've refined my objectives more precisely. For the past several years of perambulating around the byways of New York anything has been fair game. My tendency is to always try to have people doing something in my shots - that's where the story is. I appreciate others' work that don't have that human element, but my eye is always attracted to scenes with some kind of unfolding drama, a telling gesture or expression. Over the past few months I seem to have been drawn in even closer, to shoot what may well be called street portraits. That's much more difficult to do and still carry some element of a story. Enter the amazing Fujinon 14mm f/2.8 lens. Super wide angle - allows for being in really close and still be able to capture some environmental elements to get a sense of time/place.
For both of these images I was at most three feet away from the subject. The first was shot from the hip, the second looking through the optical viewfinder. Both processed in Lightroom and Nik Silver Efex Pro 2. I was drawn to shoot the first image as the store owner opened the door for a breath of fresh air on a wonderful sunny day. The second image was shot on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street - which is a crossroads for many of the 'beautiful' people from Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side and some not so beautiful, not so wealthy people who struggle to find daily sustenance any way they can.
Over the past year of shooting street and reviewing my images, I've refined my objectives more precisely. For the past several years of perambulating around the byways of New York anything has been fair game. My tendency is to always try to have people doing something in my shots - that's where the story is. I appreciate others' work that don't have that human element, but my eye is always attracted to scenes with some kind of unfolding drama, a telling gesture or expression. Over the past few months I seem to have been drawn in even closer, to shoot what may well be called street portraits. That's much more difficult to do and still carry some element of a story. Enter the amazing Fujinon 14mm f/2.8 lens. Super wide angle - allows for being in really close and still be able to capture some environmental elements to get a sense of time/place.
For both of these images I was at most three feet away from the subject. The first was shot from the hip, the second looking through the optical viewfinder. Both processed in Lightroom and Nik Silver Efex Pro 2. I was drawn to shoot the first image as the store owner opened the door for a breath of fresh air on a wonderful sunny day. The second image was shot on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street - which is a crossroads for many of the 'beautiful' people from Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side and some not so beautiful, not so wealthy people who struggle to find daily sustenance any way they can.
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