19/09/24

Walking down 5th Avenue with my Rokinon 8mm fisheye has to be some of the most fun I’ve ever had with a camera. It’s all the hip-shooting, throw-of-the-dice electricity of street photography but you eschew all the awkwardness of having to shove a camera in some unsuspecting passerby’s face on the off chance they’ll make you the next Joel Meyerowitz: for this lens you only need point upwards! The vertiginous nature of Manhattan makes for perfect material when using a fisheye of this calibre. It’s a shame that Instagram crops vertical photos to a 4:5 ratio as most of these fisheye images show the tops of all peripheral buildings careening towards the centre at the same time as the street is completely visible below, an effect that you only get when the entire 2:3 image is retained. These have to be some of my favourite photos I’ve ever taken. 

Grounds for Sculpture was a delight. I especially enjoyed the renditions of Renoir’s works. Having so many interesting subjects stand stock-still allows you to think solely about your composition and for as long as you like. Strangely, even the dragonfly I captured that day seemed petrified. If only I’d brought my macro lens!

Bringing my camera to the New York Red Bulls game taught me that sports photography from the stands is a defeating exercise without a telephoto lens that has an immensely wide aperture. Shooting at 300mm I was restricted to a maximum aperture of f/5.6, and with how fast the players move you want to shoot at a minimum of 1/1000 second. At an ISO of 1600 I had to digitally de-noise my images in Lightroom—something I am usually loath to do as it can lend images some ersatz and uncanny quality—in order to pull the shadows up to a level of intelligibility. There’s a reason pitchside cameras are usually armed with lenses that look like something taken from a Star Wars props department.