Let’s trade one famous city for another. Last week, we cruised along the train system of Berlin, Germany. This week, we’re going home! Well, we’re going to my home at least—New York City—and to celebrate, I’m going to include a few before & after photos for this episode! I spent the first 18 years of my life in Brooklyn before leaving for university and then onto a number of other places. But as they say, you can take the kid out of New York but you can never take New York out of the kid. Whenever I have an opportunity to visit, I grab my camera and meander around some of my favorite areas, mostly focusing on the Lower East Side and its surrounding neighborhoods.
On one visit several years back, I challenged myself to find everyday scenes that had strong leading lines in hopes of presenting something ordinary in a different way. For my first attempt, I found myself loitering on the staircase leading down to the Essex St. subway station. I had more than my share of stares but who cares? This is New York! The first shot I took was vertical and instantly fell flat. I thought I could coax out strong vertical lines here but, as you can see, it wasn’t in the cards
I had a gut feeling that there was something to get here, so I simply rotated my camera horizontally and placed it a few steps down, so that the handrails came out and at the viewer, like arms. I liked this composition a lot but decided to introduce what is sometimes referred to as a “Dutch Tilt” or “Dutch Angle” during post processing. By angling the photo a few degrees to the right, I was able to introduce a bit of an ominous vibe and let my stylization complement that. At first, I wasn’t sure about the hi-key look but it eventually grew on me.
I was a few blocks away from the pedestrian entrance of the Williamsburg Bridge, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. I hadn’t walked across it in many years and I was eager to return. Fortunately, I was feeling excited about the photo I had just taken and was already anticipating similar results on the bridge. Naturally, that didn’t happen. In fact, the first 30-45 minutes was a practice in frustration. I just couldn’t see any strong lines at first.
When I approached the fork in the bridge where you walk left or right, I thought I had stumbled onto something good. For some reason, though, my camera was set vertically and I ended up with a photo that didn’t appeal to me but got my creative juices flowing. Something had to be waiting with a horizontal crop.
Sure enough, there was a really fun shot of the pathway with the painted lines sweeping in front of me at the bottom of the frame. It got me excited but only for a bit. No matter what I did, I couldn’t avoid the dead space in the sky.
I really liked the possibility that this photo offered and even went ahead with stylizing it. There was something about that swoop in the foreground that kept catching my eye. The solution came to me in the form of a crop that I hardly ever use. Call me old fashioned but I almost always tend to maintain the original ratio of my photos. However, I couldn’t deny the fact that a tight, 16:9 crop did take care of that dead space while retaining my favorite parts of the photo. Sometimes, you have to break your own habits to grow.
Despite taking photos of the left path, I ended up taking the right path and that’s where I found my favorite photo of the day. The pedestrian path is split into two halves. One half is for the pedestrians walking to or from Brooklyn and the other half is split for 2-way bicycle traffic. When I started framing up the shot, I introduced a dutch tilt in camera, as opposed to the one I applied in Lightroom earlier in this post. Something about it made the shot sing. So many leading lines! The only thing left was to wait for a few pedestrians to walk into the distance. That would play into my post processing workflow.
The stylization here takes on a more vintage feel that is accentuated by a split tone and a boost in warm temp. To finish things off, I sent the image to Photoshop and applied a Tilt Shift blur using the Blur Gallery. I wanted to render the pedestrians and the pathway slightly out of focus to infuse a sense of depth.
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Brian Matiash is a Portland-based published photographer and author. He is a member of Sony’s Artisans of Imagery as well as the owner of Matiash, Inc. and the Matiash Shop.
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Filed under: Inspiration, Opinion, Photography, Technique & Tutorials Tagged: #NYC, Brian Matiash, composition, inspiration, method_bm, new york city, photo methodology, urban 
