Times Square (2011). 200mm, f/4, 1/100s, ISO 400
 When it comes to urban photography, NY is the perfect playground for the photographer. Take an ultra wide angle and make some random shots in the middle of Time Square: you will certainly take a few really nice crowdy images surrounded by impressive advertising lightenings. During my stay, I got a few interesting shots but I was wondering how I could get something different, with a completely other atmosphere than the typical rushy and blinky NY pics. To do so, I decided to wake up at early at 4am in order to see NY wake up. I took a few interesting shots of NY streets with the aurora sky in the background and continued my walk to Times Square which was still completely empty. But the cleaning teams were slowly appearing in their red baggy onepieces and two of them started to clean the Times Square red stairs. The previous days I spotted a Hyunday advertizing in the background of the stairs. This advertizing was a mix of movie clips and a slogan written in huge white font. I tried to find some words that could add some intensity to the shot and one word came: an imposing BORING appeared on the screen behind one cleaning man! I just had the time to take two shots in burst mode to capture the moment. Technical overview: I used my lens fully opened at f/4 (Canon 70-200 f/4 L IS USM) and chose an ISO value high enough to have a non shaky picture at 200mm. In this case 1/100s was fast enough thanks to the image stabilization (I would have used 1/200 at least w/o IS). Knowing that the IS allows you two win approx. 3 fstops the minimum speed would have been 1/25s but the risk of having the cleaning man blurred (especially his fast moving arms) would have been too high. |
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