Tag Archives: sidewalk

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Night, Photographs: Urban/Street

Friday Night, Manhattan

September 6, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

People out on a Friday night in Manhattan

On this evening I finally got to seriously try out something that I had been thinking of doing for some time — handheld street photography at night. Current digital cameras are providing low-light capabilities now that were almost unimaginable just a few years ago, to the point that it is possible to shoot at very high ISO setting and shoot in urban darkness almost as if it were daytime. (To be sure, there are some issues related to things like dynamic range, the need to use very large apertures, narrow DOF, dealing with noise in post, etc.)

We had just left a club where we heard a musical performance and we decided to head over to Washington Square where yet another performance was going on. Almost as soon as we left the first building it hit me that this was my opportunity to give this a shot, so I worked with a 23mm (35mm equivalent) f/1.4 lens and cranked up the ISO and started shooting. I quickly noticed that I actually had some exposure headroom, and I could lower ISO stop down a bit. I also quickly became fascinated by the nighttime shadows, which are nothing like what we see during the day. I started looking for bright “pools of light” under artificial lighting and then constructing compositions and waiting for an interesting juxtaposition of people and other elements.

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Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Walking Man With Child

September 2, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A man carrying a child walks along a Manhattan street

Beyond the most general location — “Manhattan” — I’m not certain at the moment where I made this photograph, though there is a good chance that it was in Manhattan between roughly NYU and Grand Central Station. It seems, to me, to be emblematic of New York City in many ways, and the incongruity of an individual man carrying a child while walking through the area caught my attention. To be honest, the two of them were a lucky stroke. I”m pretty certain that I had first noticed that scene and thought to photograph it as a sort of urban landscape, but that as I was framing my shots the man and child happened to walk into the scene.

In retrospect, there now seems to me to be something almost poignant in the image of the man cradling the small child in his arms as he walks past and through what appears to be a very run down urban landscape. (The truth is probably a bit less dramatic, as you can find bits and pieces of real estate that look like this in many parts of the city, from what I’ve seen.) I think that it also helps that we is caught in a bit of soft but directed light reflected into the scene from surrounding buildings. I find the details of the graffiti and related stuff on the walls to be interesting, too. Of course, to the extent that I “saw” these things at the time, it had to be largely an instinctive matter, since there is rarely enough time to carefully consider all of these things when on the street and when the subject is walking into and out of the frame!

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

The Selfie

September 1, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

On a Manhattan sidewalk, three girls dressed in black pose for a selfie as two men walk past.

Here comes another sequence of New York City street photographs, this time with several presented in a wide panoramic format. My most common format uses a 4:3 width:height ratio, but sometimes a photograph seems to work better with something else, and the 2:1 wide panoramic format can create a sense of horizontal space that I like in some photographs. When I made this one I was working very quickly — as you can imagine, this was not exactly a shot that provided me with much time for careful and cautious thought. At the time of exposure I think I might have leaned toward a black and white rendition, in traditional street photography format, but in the end I liked the blue colors of the men’s shirts and of the shaded concrete sidewalk.

I had spotted this group of three young women — girls, really — walking down the street together and having a great time and all wearing roughly similar black outfits. (One imagines them discussing this before meeting up — “I’m thinking of wearing black. How about you?”) There is usually a lot happening on the street, so my attention likely switched away from something else to consider them for only a brief moment, and when I looked back and saw them setting up for that most contemporary ritual, the selfie, I quickly made a few exposures. In an example of lucky timing, the two guys in blue shirts walked into the scene from behind me at just the right moment.

Photographs: New York City, Photographs: Urban/Street

Big Wong Restaurant

August 26, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

New York City street scene, as people pass in front of the Big Wong Restaurant in Chinatown

To an outsider, there are many things that seem to characterize New York City — the noise, the energy, the density of people, the constant motion, the often gritty character of many areas, the unique neighborhoods that bump into one another, the huge number of people out walking, the food, and much more. I’m more familiar with the famous San Francisco Chinatown (which is at least as crowded), and New York’s Chinatown feels vaguely familiar but also quite different. It certainly seems, for the most part, a lot less geared to tourists.

We went there for dinner one evening. After a week of too many expensive dinners we were looking for something both good and less expensive, so we ended up at a place near here that one of our group knew about. After dinner we went out on the streets, where it was now close to twilight. We decided to wander up towards Little Italy, and on the way we quickly passed though more of Chinatown’s narrow streets, and I managed to slow up our progress by stopping to photograph people and storefronts, including this wonderfully named restaurant with a few people and piles of trash outside on the sidewalk.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: sidewalk

Friday Night, Manhattan

Walking Man With Child

The Selfie

Big Wong Restaurant

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.