Speaking candidly - #

unposed shots of people at work, rest, and play

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While walking through Bethesda fountain in Central Park I spotted a photographer and model (wearing a great outfit) taking pictures all over the grounds. They even borrowed a musicians cello as a temporary prop (that's the cellist foot sticking out from under the photographers bag). Their efforts made for a good shot to add to my collection.

This was my first time walking over what has become my favorite bridge in all of Central Park. As I did, I came upon this bride and groom getting their pictures taken by their wedding photographers. I always seem to run into wedding parties in parks, and for the most part leave them alone, because I don't want them to loose focus on the directions they're receiving from their photographers. But every once in a while I can tell when I can get a shot that wouldn't be a distraction, and in this instance I got several.

I just love the 'Bow bridge' and I chose this off angle to better highlight the great architecture of this the most famous transverse in Central Park, as well as to make sure their wedding photographers maintained a clear line of sight to their subjects. Of all the shots I took of them that afternoon this one is my clear favorite.

$To this day June 1st 2009 is still my favorite day spent photographing in Central Park. This photo here and the one that follows represents both ends of the spectrum in terms of hopes and disappointments from that day. This first shot was one I looked forward to adding to my gallery the most, but turned out the most disappointing when I looked at it when I got home. The shot you'll see after this one was one I thought would only turn out to be a pretty decent, but as I edited it I could see that it was easily the best candid shot I'd ever taken. The two photo's combined to help reinforce a lesson I take with me each day I photograph, which is - Don't waste too much time lamenting over a shot you butchered, another fine image may be right around the corner. If your mind is still with the shot you missed you'll end up missing the next one too. The steps that led to me missing this first shot started when I broke from my search for candid shots and stopped at Turtle pond by Belvedre Castle. I had made a vow today to only concentrate on candid shot opportunities, but as the sun started sinking in the sky, the warm light and shadows made for super landscape opportunities. Temporarily giving in I started looking at the landscape imagining it in all sorts of lighting situations, at different times of the year spring thru winter. While I was at it I decided to stop my lens down as far as it could go and took some shots to see for myself just how bad diffraction hurt image quality when I did so. I had always thought about doing that back when I used slide film 20 years ago, but money was extremely tight for me back then and I didn't want to waste a single frame on a shot I knew I was going to make bad on purpose. But now that my photo world was digital, images today are free so I can experiment away. So after recording the experimental shots I started walking away while my face was buried in the back of my camera reviewing the images on my view screen. I figured I probably wasn't going to run into any nice people shots at that exact moment that would require my immediate attention, and naturally fate called the hand I was holding, and I lost. Looking up to make sure I was headed in the right direction for the path that would take me to a small lake on the west side of the park near 101st street, I spotted a group of folks having a nice small picnic on the Great Lawn. Headed towards them were a father and his little girl. One of the friends sitting on the lawn started blowing colorful little bubbles towards her, and she started raising her hand up towards them. The heavy back lighting from the sun sinking in the western sky created near magical lighitng with wonderful golden highlights and nice form creating shadows. As the little girls eyes locked onto the bubbles I whipped my camera around and raised it up to my face. (DAMN!) My camera lens was still set to f32, if I took the time to change any settings the father would have closed the distance on his friends at the picnic and the perfect composition would have been destroyed, so I was going to have to take the shot at that absurd f-stop. I wanted a tight cropping to emphasize the girls eyes and hand reaching for the bubbles, but my aim was off, and I cropped a little too much of the left side of the picture. It was now or never and I squeezed the trigger for a quick 3 burst recording of the scene. Flipping the camera around and looking at the image on my LCD screen, the picture didn't look too bad. Showing the shot to the father, he liked it alot. I wanted to get more shots of her, and Al called his daughter Neco over so I could try. But as he was waiting for her to come over I looked up in the sky and saw that the sun was falling lower and lower and if I didn't leave immediately I would never make it to that pond while there was some usable light left. I had always wanted to take pictures at this pond but my trips to Central Park always started from the southern end and by the time I worked my way up the park the sun set in the sky long before I reached the pond, and this was as close as I had ever gotten before. So I told Al I had to rush, but I'd send him the picture when I processed them later, and hurriedly headed for the pond. Looking at the shots on my computer when I got home I could see that the tiny f32 aperture combined with the low ISO setting I had chose for the scenic shots I took at the Castle, forced my camera to choose a shutter speed too low to freeze Al and Neco in their tracks. Plus I shot the scene slightly crooked and had to crop even more off the left side to correct that in the final edits. The resulting shot of the best scene of the day was so badly butchered by me that for three years I didn't even bother to upload it to my gallery here on Smugmug till I finally had a change of heart. That night after getting over my disappointment over this shot I moved on to the shots I captured at the pond off 101st street. As I watched the image transform on my computer as I edited it, I saw the most amazing candid I'd ever recorded to this point in all my 20 years of photographing develop right before my eyes. So now when I run across a great shot and totally ruin it I try not to get overly upset over it, another great image could be waiting for me to capture and I need my wits about me if I want to get it.$

For as long as I have been photographing in Central Park I always wanted to travel to this little pond that I spotted on all the park maps just off of 101st street on the west side. However because I always started from the southern end of the park, on my trips from Staten Island I always ended up taking so many pictures along the way up the park that the sun set in the sky long before I got there, and I would have to turn around and go home every time - until today. For the first time ever I made it here just as the sun had disappeared behind the trees. As I walked around the picturesque willow tree lined pond I spotted these two conversing on this great looking wood bench. I loved this scene that these two created talking to each other under this tree. For almost the entire time that I photographed them however, their backs were to me. Since the branches of the tree were too high up to include in the shot, I took in half the trunk to give the sense of the scene I was observing. But that created a lot of dead space, as the only thing to the left of the bench at the time was a headless goose that almost never stopped pruning it's feathers on the other side of my view. With both their backs to me as they talked, it made for an ok image, but nothing special.

Then the girl started to push her backpack to the end of the bench with her left hand, and turned to face her friend. Suddenly the excitement meter went off in my head, and I zoomed in a bit tighter, keeping a little bit of the trunk in view, and waited until she was almost settled in, but still maintaining a little tension in her pose, then I fired off my camera.

Later when I was going over my shots for the day, and came to this scene, I noticed that my headless goose had been joined by several other feathered friends filling in the dead spot perfectly. Everything in the scene came together to create a perfect moment in time on this, the last scene I photographed, at the end of what was my first ever "candid only day", a day in which I ended up capturing more great candid images in that one afternoon, then I had ever managed to collect in my entire life. All of which is why when I look back at all of the candid shots I've taken since, this photo is still probably my sentimental favorite - not my best, but my favorite none the less.

Taken around 1984 in September, this for almost 20 years was one of the only decent candid shots I'd ever taken. (this and a nice candid shot of mom doing her bible studies). Even so this photo still means more to me than whatever visual quality it possesses.

I was on vacation at the time, the first vacation taken exclusively for photography purposes, and it was a perfect summer afternoon, and while I was capturing this painter, I became caught up in the thought of how I was doing what I liked to do immensely, while this gentleman, no doubt was doing what he liked to do immensely. And how it would be the greatest thing in the world if everyone, everywhere was able to say the same thing each day that they went to work.

This shot was taken with one of my holdover series 'E' lenses. That was Nikon's cheaper lens line created to go with their beginners camera the 'EM', which was my first camera. This zoom allowed me to visualize the world in a whole new way through my little EM's viewfinder, and was responsible for my capturing the world before me in so many new ways. Even after I brought my refurbished F3 at the Nikon house at Rockefeller Center and started adding several Nikkor lenses to go with it, I still kept using this lens for several years afterwards as it's image quality far exceeded it's price tag.
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Nikon F3
Kodachrome 64
70-210 series E F4 zoom
80mm
f4
1/30th sec

All the rain we got in 09' spoiled many a day off for me last year when I wanted to go photograph. So after a particularly bad stretch of rained out days off, a sunny Sunday broke the streak and I decided to go out and photograph New Yorkers trying to enjoy a sunny Sunday. For my location I decided on the South Street Seaport. But when I got there I discovered a music festival was happened on the grounds and the place was too packed to walk around and photograph individuals milling about.

I figured I could either leave and find another spot to photograph, or stay and make the best of it. I chose the latter, seeing as I was there and so were a ton of New Yorkers, and they certainly were enjoying their day in the sunshine. I decided to record my trip through the crowd starting from the back on the balcony, and then take shots as I wriggled my way through the crowd to finally get as near to the stage as someone without a press pass could.

While walking through Bethesda fountain in Central Park I spotted a photographer and model (wearing a great outfit) taking pictures all over the grounds. They even borrowed a musicians cello as a temporary prop (that's the cellist foot sticking out from under the photographers bag). Their efforts made for a good shot to add to my collection.

Nikon D300 |

More details: exif |

Original size: 2711x4066 |

Current: 400x600 |

filename: dsc_6792 looking for an inspirational shot |

Keywords: summer cello candid central park bethesda fountain area

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