Thanks all for your comments!
Nice Shots!
Were you harassed at all shooting photographs in the city, especially the architecture? I had a friend who had a problem with that a couple years ago.
Nope, I didn't run into any issues with carrying and shooting with an SLR. There were a lot of tourists with SLR's snapping away... even in museums where photography is actually prohibited. I suspect as time passes after 9/11, people are getting less overly anal about "security" issues.
Great photos! Many of your shots have a "retro" feel to them that I think is beyond just being in B&W. The park benches feel almost like they're through some sort of old camera. Not quite pin-hole, but pretty old. What kind of pp settings did you use there? The subject matter in the first one feels very 50/60s. Even the subway car -- the colors feel different. Is that OOC or with some pp?
Also, I've been considering a travel lens super-zoom (in my case, the Tamron 18-270). Most of your shots look like they were wide angle. Did you actually end up with any keeps that were beyond, say, 80mm FL, where that much zoom was important to have?
Great work.
Thanks bking1000! I shoot RAW and post-process in Aperture and PS CS4. I usually tweak exposure, WB, contrast, black point, shadows/highlights in Aperture. Then I export into CS4 for some curves adjustment, Viveza (an amazing PS plugin that gives allows you to process using Control Points, just like in Capture NX), Noise ninja for noise reduction, and finally USM sharpening. My B&W shots follow the same process more or less, except I do the B&W conversion in PS using gradient map.
As for the photos looking retro... this wasn't really a conscious thing. I personally like B&W with a lot of contrast and I usually just tweak my photos until they look good to me. I suppose I like old looking photos....
hehe
As for focal length, NYC is definitely a place for wide angle... everything is very close together and condensed and walking around with my 24-70 on a cropped sensor made me realize how difficult it was to shoot stuff like architecture with that lens... hence why i used 18-200 most of the time. With that said, I did take a number of shots that I liked with focal lengths in the range of 135-200. You can see the EXIF info on my site by clicking on the "photo info" tab when viewing photos.
I just clicked the link in your sig and had a really weird moment when I saw your zenfolio site... you have written almost the exact same thing I have on
my smugmug page!
You even have a cheesy shot of you taking a self portrait in the mirror!
Freaky...
HAHA! That is really uncanny! Are you...me?
I think the building in the first one is taking up too much of the frame and there is some weird reflection/glare/smudge/whatever in the flag picture. Other than that they're fine.
Thanks for the comments! That "reflection/smudge" in the flag photo is actually smoke/steam coming from one of the manholes... I purposely took it with the smoke in the frame, but I guess not everyone like it! hehe...
