Last November the Chickadee was in NYC over the weekend for a conference and suggested I come over to join her. In a previous life, I had commuted to New York every week for 12 years, and for 18 months during that period the Chickadee had an apartment down in the east village. So it would be nice to revisit old haunts and check out our favourite locations for dance, jazz and food again.
After 17 years this was my first return trip to Manhattan. We had an insanely good time, and I was reminded all over again why I travelled there so many times (around 500 visits).
As we were going to be zipping all around the city, I didn’t want to take a major camera kit with me. I brought my tiny Nikon 1 camera and an array of tiny lenses, with the vague aim of shooting some street shots and some river views. For most of the weekend, I didn’t get anything worth keeping. But on the last morning I went down to the Brooklyn bridge to get some shots at sunrise.
Afterwards I wandered into the nearby Wall Street area with the faint hope that I might get some street shots there. Everyone was coming into work at this time, and the sun was low and hard, coming through the gaps in the buildings. I used the opposite of a normal street lens, which is usually the classic 35mm wide angle. Instead I used a 300mm telephoto, so perspective was compressed and the scene was quite narrow. I waited until people came into the shafts of sunlight, and spot metered only on the faces, rather than on the whole scene. As a result the images have intense contrast - I did very little to them other than to adjust the exposure and contrast slightly. I also ran the camera in burst mode at 10 frames per second.
Because of the huge impact of the shafts of light, images taken fractions of a second apart are quite different, even though they may feature the same people - such as the sequence with the blue mask later in the series. Anyway, I hope you like them.
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