I’ll do three short posts on New York. The Good, the Bad and the Takeaways. I did something similar already in this post, but this time I want to focus on the quality of my photography there. Let’s start off on the positive side!
Variety
Actually this is one is more about the circumstances than my performance. Had the following different variety of contexts:
- Dense City Setting in Manhattan
- Urban Setting in Brooklyn
- Natural-ish Area – Central Park
- Indoor – Museums, Restaurants
- Night
- Towns
- Beach
I’m far from saying that I did well in each of those settings, but there I don’t have that “way off” sense either when looking at my output. I’ve seen other folks’ style being forcefully applied to an improper settings – e.g. duotone rendering of an amusement park -, at least that wasn’t the case here. I think I got a good hang of the beach areas, and Urban / Manhattan looks authentic too. The Central Park and the indoor photos bear little character though.
Utilization of Equipment
I had a relatively broad kit with me that consists of
- a Nikon D7500 camera
- Tamron’s 18-400mm HLD lens which I bought for the occasion
- Tokina 11-20mm wide angle
- the plastic fantastic Nikon 35mm f/1.8
- Nikon 50mm f/1.8
- Nissin i400 compact flash
and I used it! Normally I overdo gear, but this time I was happy to have each lens at my disposal. Moreover, I’m confident to say that I made a good use of all the Tamron’s focal lenght range, which is massive! Plenty of wide angles, but just as many extreme telephoto shoots. 600mm is crazy long, yet I used it plenty, squirrels, birds, and beyond. The Tokina could have seen more use, but some of the obligatory Manhattan shot’s would not have been possible without that focal range.
I used the flash sparingly – the D7500’s high-ISO quality is beyond amazing -, but reading two books on flash use before the journey helped me create this still far from perfect, but at least usable shot:
Night Photography
Night photography is more about gear than daylight photography, and having the D7500 and two fast primes definitely helped here. Still, I was able to capture some memorable nightscapes, which I was pretty afraid of – I actually planned a Budapest city walk at night just to prep up for night shots in New York, but it never happened.
Decent use of Geometry
I’ll get into more details in the Bad post about the lack of concept and vision in the whole visit, but probably geometry is where I have earned a passing grade in my book.
Diverse Portraiture
Given that my girlfriend has been my primary subject ever since I started photography, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that I captured her in the broadest variety of settings. None of the portraits go beyond trivial, but at least the variety and some composition basics are there.