Friday Night, Manhattan. New York City. August 8, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
People out on a Friday night in Manhattan
On this evening I finally got to seriously try out something that I had been thinking of doing for some time — handheld street photography at night. Current digital cameras are providing low-light capabilities now that were almost unimaginable just a few years ago, to the point that it is possible to shoot at very high ISO setting and shoot in urban darkness almost as if it were daytime. (To be sure, there are some issues related to things like dynamic range, the need to use very large apertures, narrow DOF, dealing with noise in post, etc.)
We had just left a club where we heard a musical performance and we decided to head over to Washington Square where yet another performance was going on. Almost as soon as we left the first building it hit me that this was my opportunity to give this a shot, so I worked with a 23mm (35mm equivalent) f/1.4 lens and cranked up the ISO and started shooting. I quickly noticed that I actually had some exposure headroom, and I could lower ISO stop down a bit. I also quickly became fascinated by the nighttime shadows, which are nothing like what we see during the day. I started looking for bright “pools of light” under artificial lighting and then constructing compositions and waiting for an interesting juxtaposition of people and other elements.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.