A Winter Weekend in Manhattan: Through the Lens

Early January weekend was planned to be a photography get-together with a community group, meeting up in Chelsea for a bustling day and a half of activities. Unfortunately plans changed due to a death in the family of the organizer, but I had already bought my Amtrak ticket and a one night stay in the boutique Evelyn Hotel.

So I decided to make it a solo vacation weekend of nonstop street photography and walking to my next bite.

For this trip I only brought my trusty Leica M4 and a Zeiss 50mm f2 Planar lens with some Kentmere 400 and Kodak Vision 3 500T. It was bitterly cold and windy, with sun just peaking through clouds every once in a while. I did my best to capture how I saw the city, somewhere between being a tourist and a street rat.

I've been trying to get better at "thinking in deep focus" as I like to put it, better known as "layering." Most of the time in Manhattan I was shooting around f4 or f5.6 if light allowed. When shooting digital I often find myself shooting as wide open as my lens allows, letting blurry backgrounds cover up sub-optimal compositions. When shooting on a manual focus rangefinder, you appreciate the greater depth of field of smaller apertures to help get sharp focus. But shooting a rangefinder also teaches you to put a frame on the world with everything in focus, and thus shooting small apertures also lends to creating images similar to what you saw in the moment.

As a street rat tourist, I enjoyed having no specific goals or aims other than to see. It was quite a peaceful two days, with little to nothing on my mind, no airpods, just searching for another dollar slice. Walking the streets of Midtown, I walked past many a location relegated in my mind to a 90's Rom-Com film set, my mind struggling to calibrate how much of my enjoyment was viseral and how much was just the remembrance of my expectations of NYC.

Advertising specifically caught my eye this weekend. I am used to billboards of the local PA plumbing company or jewelry store, not celebrity endorsement.

The Meatpacking district was another spot that captured my attention. I decided to go see if a gallery was showing at the Leica store, and although there was no gallery, I did manage to warm up a bit while purusing some books they had out.

It was a lovely solo trip and I left with a new simple appreciation for the historic street photographers of Manhattan.