Street Shots
Snoop Dogg (Lion?)
1/30s . f/5.6 . ISO 3200 . 55 mm
First thing’s first, I’m sorry I left this site for over a year. Hopefully, I’ll be posting again semi-regularly. It looks pretty bad to see “November 2011″ as the last post before this one!
Anyway…back in September, I was walking around in Times Square and found Snoop Dogg/Lion, whatever he wants to call himself these days, walking around as well. This is the best paparazzi shot I’ve got of him. What’s interesting is that he was really loving his photo taken, it seemed like he purposely was standing as still as possible so that people could get the best picture.
Normally at night, it can be difficult to photograph people walking around. There usually just isn’t enough light to get a high enough shutter speed unless you feel like using the flash. Notice the ISO here is 3200, but with f/5.6 I am only able to shoot as fast as 1/30 of a second. In this scenario, one really needs a “fast lens”, – which means one with a wide aperture that lets in plenty of light. Unfortunately, I wasn’t using such a lens.
Feast of San Gennaro (Little Italy)
1/80 - f/5.6 - ISO 125 - 55 mm
Every year in Little Italy, the streets get shut down for this festival of Italian-American culture. The crowds are pretty insane as you can see from the first shot. Some people are even nuts enough to actually want to eat outside at the restaurants while the crowds stream by staring at their pasta.
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Yorkville Oktoberfest 2011
1/80s . f/5.6 . ISO 1000 . 55 mm
Our neighborhood has an annual mini- ‘Oktoberfest’ to celebrate it’s (waning) German heritage. As you can see, the band members are a bit ancient, but they are still going strong.
Yorkville used to have tons of Germans with beer gardens, and East 86th street used to be called German Broadway.
Unfortunately, the German influence in the area has nearly vanished with only a few remaining vestiges. One is Schaller & Weber German Delicatessen, whose banner you can see in the upper right of the first photo. The other is Heidelberg Restaurant which is pretty much next door to Schaller. Finally there is Zion-St. Mark’s Church (last photo) which still holds bilingual services in German and English.
The church used to be downtown in an area called Klein-Deutschland (Little Germany). Most of the German community ended up moving uptown to Yorkville after the church chartered a steamship (the General Slocum) that exploded and killed 1000 parishioners and children.
1/400 . f/4.5 . ISO 3200 . 32 mm
1/320 . f/5.6 . ISO 3200 . 55 mm
These kids weren’t too keen on the music. I thought it was good though
1/125 . f/7.1 . ISO 100 . 55 mm
Blast from the past
1/13s . f/4.5 . ISO 3200 . 30 mm
To advertise their TV show Boardwalk Empire (which takes place in Prohibition-era Atlantic City), HBO ran these subway trains from the 1920s every weekend in September on the 2/3 line. Pretty nifty promotional stunt if you ask me.
This car says it was in service from 1924 to 1969. That’s a pretty long life for a subway car, which is why my father said…hey I remember that train. This particular one is known as a Lo-V type.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo-V_(New_York_City_Subway_car).
Shooting was a bit difficult in such a low light environment. Lucky for me I was able to jack-up the ISO settings in order to get a quick enough shutter speed for these shots. Pay attention to the noise reduction settings in Lightroom so you can minimize the effect of too much noise in your shots. It’s ok to live a bit of it in, it looks better than too smeary.
Coney Island at Night
1/40s . f/2.8 . ISO 800 . 35mm(equiv)
This is a shot I took of Coney Island at night. My DSLR was being fixed at the time, so I shot it with a Canon G7, which is an advanced compact camera. An interesting thing to note on this shot, is that the aperture is fairly wide at f/2.8. But despite that fact, notice how deep a depth of field we get on the shot. The reason for this is due to the smaller sensor on the compact camera.
On a DSLR in order to get the equivalent depth of field, you would need a setting of about f/13 on a full-frame camera and about f/8 on a cropped-sensor camera. This fact illustrates why it is near impossible to do blurred backgrounds with a compact sensor camera.
Cycling in Midtown Manhattan
1/2000s . f/5.6 . ISO 640 . 250 mm
… is kind of a pain in the ass.
But wait a second, is that poor guy really wedged between those cars?
