New York

This was my first dedicated street photography and video project. I took my camera with me to Zanzibar (on another blog) on holiday a few year ago and fell in love with street photography.

I based myself in Queens and got the bus into Manhattan, from there I did 90% of travelling on foot to get to know the place.

I literally walked the streets for 12 hours a day with my camera and covered a marathon each day.

However I always found time to sample the food and drinks of New York.

The equipment I used was all designed to be lightweight and inconspicuous. I used a old Primark rucksack with a small Lowe Apline camera bag inside, changing lenses was difficult but it didn’t look like I had expensive equipement.

Camera: Nikon D810 and Iphone 6plus

Nikon ais 20mm 3.5 manual focus

Sigma Art 35mm 1.4

Sigma 50mm 1.4

Nikon 105mm 2.5 manual focus

Steady cam

The first day I had a lot to learn, people are walking fast and very close but after a lot of trial and error I kept on my 35mm 1.4 the the majority of shots , which also happens to be my favourite lens.

The Technique: Most street photographers use apatures f8 to get everything in focus, but I wanted my own style of shallow depth of field. This proved really, really challenging at first. So I adopted the technique of setting the focus to manual and at around 2 meters. I stoped the apature down to around f2 to f2.5 (this also let in a lot of light to shoot at night). I basically the estimated when the subject will be around 2 meters and pulled the trigger.

Another technique I adopted which was a lot easier was talking to people in bars and asking to take their photograph, everyone was really nice and open to the idea, I’m not sure I could get away with this in London.

To get stable photos and video I used walls, fences, bridges anything with a stable platform as a tripod would have slowed me down and drawn a lot of attention.

As for filming I used a glidcam walking around, handheld or sometimes just my iphone as it has super slomotion (240fps).

Music by Noveller

Prints are avalable from £29.99

email me: mattdoyle111@gmail.com