by Ken Hubbard
The High Line on the west side of Manhattan Island runs from 30th St. between 10th & 11th Ave. all the way down to Washington & Gansevoor St. Along the way you pass such beautiful spots such as the Radial Bench, Chelsea Thicket and the Diller - Von Furstenberg Sundeck and Water Feature. The High Line started out as an elevated railway in 1934 and the last train ran atop the the rails in 1980, and was then left abandoned. Until 2005 when the City of New York takes ownership of the railway and after 4 years of construction the first section was reopened to the public as an elevated park in 2009.
I went into this shoot with pretty small expectations, since it was a nice night in the city and it seemed everyone had the same idea as me, to check out the sights of the High Line. I also wanted to test myself and only bring 1 camera body, 2 lenses (Tamron's SP 10-24mm & SP 60mm 1:1 Macro) and a GorillaPod Focus with a Ballhead X. Anyone who knows me probably is laughing really hard and not believing that is all I had with me, but it's true, my new motto is...the lighter the better! Ha, ha, ha, I'll keep trying to say that with a straight face!
The two things I wanted to accomplish on this shoot was to use nothing but available light and try to have as few people as possible in each image. The first part of what I wanted (to shoot only in available light) was made easy by the abundance of great light all along the stretch. Keeping the people out of the images, that was going to be a different story. As I was setting up each shot, I don't think I went more than a second or two without someone crossing through the scene I framed out in my Viewfinder. Since the longer you keep the shutter open the better chance you have of no one showing up in your images, I went with very long exposures. Both of the images in this Enewsletter where taken with 25 second exposures and had at least 8 -10 people walk through the frame. As you can see with such an extreme long shutter not one person showed up in the image. Lastly, using the ultra-wide angle lens and it's dramatic perspective allowed me to create some unique images using the lines of the benches, hand rails and walkway.
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