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| Urban Cowboy | ||||
From the window of his former studio 16 stories above ground level, André Costantini discovers a new perspective on the New York City landscape using the Tamron 200-500mm Di lens. |
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| SP AF200-500mm
F/5-6.3 Di LD (IF)
by Jennifer Gidman Zumpano |
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A congregation of desolate train cars settled down for the evening in the West Side Yard. A stenciled brick-wall marker for a packing and shipping company. The empty numbered spaces of an oil-stained parking lot.
These may not be the images that one immediately conjures up when thinking about shooting an urban landscape—but for Tamron photographer André Costantini, they represent the true New York that existed right outside his window. |
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An Eye for the Abstract |
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All of the photos shown here were taken from Costantini’s former studio, located 16 floors up from the sights below, with the Tamron 200-500mm lens. Costantini’s self-imposed challenge: to find defined forms in the manmade world. “I was looking for an element of abstraction, but not an extreme that it was so textual you couldn’t identify what it was,” he explains. “Maybe it will take some people an extra second to perceive what they’re looking at when they look at one of these images—that actually creates a stronger connection between the viewer and the image.” |
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As he scanned the cityscape from his stories-high perch, Costantini was on the lookout for just the right light, or just the right scene. “Sometimes the light would strike me, and sometimes it was more like sketching,” he says. “I use the lens as the tool to help me see. With the street lamp and lines in the road image, for example, I don't think I ever would have seen that until I started seeing how life looked through a 500mm lens. That's where the adventure begins—then you start to look for compositions.” |
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When dealing with inanimate objects, knowing what your true subject actually may not always be clear-cut. “In the case of the Overseas building shot, the subject is the building accented with the flag, as well as the view through the windows that reveals what’s inside the building,” he says. “And the faded paint on the brick is a throwback to an older New York.” Or when shooting a streetlight juxtaposed against the city street below, the lamp itself may have been the focal point, but the bend in the light against the straight lines in the road was the visual component as a whole that captured Costantini’s interest. |
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A Zoom With a View |
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Using the 200-500mm lens allowed Costantini to maximize the urban imagery he captured from his sole vantage point. “The main advantage of this lens was the focal length it had to offer,” he says. “Most of these images were shot at 500mm. The lens is really sharp, and offering this long of a zoom range give you the opportunity to create extreme telephoto image. It turned out to be ideal, considering the fact that I was 16 floors above the cityscape with a mostly unobstructed view. In other words, these images really couldn’t have been captured with anything other than the 200-500mm lens. Plus, the autofocus on this lens is surprisingly fast and accurate for longer focal-length lens.” |
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Costantini used the camera’s meter for exposure purposes. “Most of these images were monotone grey anyway, so the camera’s meter did a good job on exposure,” he explains. “In the case of both the Essex House and the Empire State Building, the amount of light and dark was enough to get the correct exposure.” |
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All images were shot on a tripod with a self-timer to avoid camera shake—except for Costantini’s night shot of one of the Manhattan’s most famous landmarks. “I handheld this shot of the Empire State Building, and thus the blur, which is nice when done with the right image,” he says. “The building is so recognizable that even with the blur you know what it is.” |
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| Costantini tried to isolate his subjects in most of his images, and he would often vary his shooting times to capture the same subject in a different light. “I would shoot on a cloudy day, then on a sunny day, sometimes at night, to give different looks to the same subject,” he says. He even altered some of the shots he captured from their original states (see this link for a quick Photoshop lesson on how he transformed an angled shot into a head-on front view). |
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Tip Box Embracing the Blur While you often want to avoid camera shake (and nearly all of Costantini's urban landscape images were shot on a tripod with a self-timer to avoid this problem), sometimes you can use the blurred effect to your advantage if it's done purposefully and with the right image. Costantini used this technique with a nighttime shot of one of the Manhattan's most famous landmarks. "I handheld this shot of the Empire State Building, and thus the blur," he says. "The building is so recognizable that even with the blur you know what it is." |
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