Some Local Colour

Traditional street photography gravitates towards black and white images. I prefer black and white for street work to isolate the shapes and themes I find interesting in the image; sometimes colour just works a charm.

Times Square at night is a riot of colour. After the "clean up" it lost most of its grit, save the cranky cartoon character clad panhandlers and the occasional scalper hustling tickets. The lighting, on the other hand, rivals Las Vegas and Shinjuku in Tokyo (I should dig up the those Japanese images). I used to sweat things like colour balance and such, but really, it's such a pop-art atmosphere in these sort of situations that I just set everything to auto white balance and go.

Road Warriors

Rain always makes for some interesting colour images, especially if there are some bright colours to work with. The umbrella image in my previous post was basically a monochrome image and it worked better, in my opinion, as black and white. On the other hand this image of Times Square with the slashing line of red tables glistening in the rain shows what you can get on a rainy day.

Red Tables

New York's finest are getting a lot of flak right now but the Traffic Division always gives a wonderful source of material. Some look like dancers, some look like actors, some could be evangelical tent preachers as they herd New York's obdurate traffic around construction, parades, protests and whatever the hell else happens on New York's streets. Again, the rain really saturated this traffic cop's safety vest and his arms outstretched in benediction belie the fact that he was questioning an Escalade driver's ancestry, sexual proclivities and planetary origin.

Benedictus

I posted this red Eldorado in my first series of posts about New York but I went back and did some post processing to it. There is a wonderful set of Kodachrome presets for LightRoom that for the life of me I can't remember where I found them; I do recall that they were free. Anyway, here's that red Eldorado processed as Kodachrome 25.

Red Eldorado