Roger Says...
When the lighting or particular shooting situations are difficult to gauge in a manual manner, I often opt to run in program mode. This also facilitates being able to cover a lot more ground on foot in a compressed timeframe.
Compositionally, I usually approach the city with very little in terms of a set agenda and places or things I need to shoot. I visit general areas and each trip tends to 'unfold' for me. I really think my shooting is sight, feeling and awareness (designs, light, unique items...). I like to think that I let it come to me instead of chasing it or forcing something. Only a few times have I had any subject in mind for part of a shoot, with the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building being examples.
Initially I tried multiple exposure times in shutter priority and multiple focal lengths, resulting in quite a few JPEG images that tested scenarios. I would later cull through all these shots and choose those I thought were the best to share on Flickr. This did help me develop a more innate feel for the relationship of light to shutter speed at night.
It was tranquil, calm, serene, and he watched the Verrazano bridge shine in the far-off glitter of evening.
By Linus Gelber
With Roger Erickson
Here a dark construction crane rises out of candied sepia foreground winter fog, while grand buildings gleam in the vague distance. Here floodlights trace the gold crown of an ornate midtown Manhattan skyscraper with drama and elegant poise. And here the webbed lights of Gotham stream out in bridging arcs over dark waters, frozen in a faerie instant of stone and steel. This is New York: this is New York imagined as a sleek city of polish and rapture, pattern and shine.
New Jersey photographer Roger Erickson (on Flickr: nj_dodge) is the architect of these sweeping images, and midway through the Memorial Day Weekend we meet in midtown to shoot the Queensborough Bridge âââ our own small way of looking for fun and feeling groovy, if you will. The city is lazy and Sunday-quiet, as close as it gets to empty. The day is calm. Roger has been on Roosevelt Island taking pictures of derelict hospital ruins; I've been on a boat. The bridge has been over the East River, doing what bridges do.
Roger is affable and unassuming, and we talk a bit and scuff at the ground, look at the trestlework, gaze at the light. I had wondered if we would attack the bridge as diagnostic of inspiration, nailing down first impressions first and then refining our approach, angle by angle, worrying the final images down to the bone. Instead, at Roger's lead, we come to it in a familiar roundabout fashion. We start by wandering away, heading vaguely downtown.
"I try to present things in a new light, in a new perspective," he says. "That's what I really like. This city is so dynamic. I could spend the next 20 years doing this and still find stuff to shoot." As luck would have it, this is one of Manhattan's Stonehenge evenings âââ twice a year the setting sun shines directly, in theory, down all of the cross-town streets. We stop for a while and set up westerly. As luck would also have it, it's cloudy. Manhattanhenge is a bust. We walk on.
Roger's images of New York's bridges are among his best-loved and most-viewed work on Flickr, which he joined in September of 2005. He has a gift for seeing the spans in clean, natural lines, and for photographing them without any particular pretension. How did he come to start? He describes walking one night last winter on South Beach in Staten Island, the least populous and most cheerfully ignored of New York's five boroughs, near where he went to college. It was tranquil, calm, serene, and he watched the Verrazano bridge shine in the far-off glitter of evening. Captivated by the lights and the many shifting colors on the cables and the roadbed and in the water below, he brought his camera to bear, and that was pretty much that.
"Bridges began to hold a fascination with me after the Verrazano shoot," he says later, by email. "I believe this is when I started to realize that the lights, reflections, water current and clouds, among other things, constantly provide variety when shooting the bridges at night. I tend to think that the intriguing part about this subject is that virtually no two photos will be alike."
We've circled downtown and taken pictures of headlights, of doors, of steam gushing from the middle of 57th Street. Watching Roger work is something like watching fog gather âââ the air thickens in a series of gradual, unremarkable degrees, until all of a sudden you can't see a thing. Roger pops his tripod down at streetside, gazing intently at the fold-out LCD screen of his Nikon E8800 point-and-shoot, and when I look over again he's got the camera peering in some completely different direction, unruffled and intent. "What are you shooting?" I wonder. "Oh," he answers, waving vaguely at all of downtown. "This."
As dark falls in earnest we land, almost by chance, at the marge of the East River. The sky is sometimes red, sometimes blue, sometimes inky violet. Roger does only minimal post-processing on his images, and he seems happy with tonight's menu. We spread out our gear. Tacked down like a museum butterfly, our bridge stretches, glowing, across a reach of water.
Utata Presents is written by Linus Gelber and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work on our submissions page.