Dawn in Wall Street
In November 2023, a weekend trip to New York City — a first return to Manhattan in seventeen years, after around five hundred previous visits during twelve years of weekly commuting. The Nikon 1 V3 came along rather than a major kit: small, fast, and inconspicuous.
On the last morning, a walk down to Brooklyn Bridge for shots at sunrise, followed by a wander into the Wall Street area with the faint hope of some street photography. Everyone was arriving for work, and the sun was low and hard, forcing shafts of light through the gaps between the buildings. Rather than a classic wide-angle street lens, a 300mm-equivalent telephoto was used to compress perspective and narrow the scene. Spot metering on faces only — not the whole scene — produced images with intense, almost extreme contrast that required very little post-processing.
The camera ran in burst mode at 10 frames per second. Because of the dramatic and rapidly shifting shafts of light, images taken fractions of a second apart are quite different from one another — as is visible in the sequences featuring the same subjects. The long shutter speeds required by the telephoto in bright sun pushed the Nikon 1 to its electronic shutter limit of 1/16000s for much of the session.
Photographs in this album include: Sunrise on the Manhattan Bridge from under Brooklyn Bridge, Wall street noir (sequence of 46 images), Salt 1–5, and more.
For camera settings, techniques and equipment used in shoots like this, see the Technique posts on mcaughtry.photo.