Flat Ground: Skateboarding on a New York Pier at Two Times of Day
New York, United States · October 18, 2017 · 2 min read
One skater, one stretch of pier, and the same spot shot at sunset and again in hard blue daylight - a small study in how completely the hour changes the photograph while nothing else does.
This is four pictures of one person on one pier, and the only real variable is what time it was. I like it as a teaching set for exactly that reason.
The dusk frame
At sunset the pier becomes a corridor. The lamp posts march away in a line, the surface goes warm and slightly wet-looking, and the sky does most of the work. The subject is standing still, board under one arm, quite small in the frame.
It is the most atmospheric image in the set and the least informative. You could not tell from it whether he can actually skate.
The daylight frames
Come back in the middle of a clear day and the same pier is a completely different tool. The sky goes to a hard saturated blue, the concrete goes bright, and a figure in the air separates cleanly against it with no lighting at all.
That is where the flip frame comes from - low camera, wide lens, shot from close enough that the board is bigger than the skyline. And then immediately after, the opposite: him sitting on the board in the middle of an empty pier, tiny, the whole city reduced to a strip along the bottom of the frame.
“Sunset gives you the mood. Midday gives you the proof. A set usually needs both.”
Shooting skating without a fisheye
Skate photography has a house style - very wide, very low, flash on the board - and it exists for good reasons. But it is a style built to sell tricks, and I was not shooting tricks, I was shooting a person.
So there is exactly one action frame here and three portraits, including a long-lens one where the river and the towers dissolve completely and all that is left is a face under a cap. When I later shot the Catalyst skateboards work in Miami commercially, that ratio was more or less the brief.
Piers are worth knowing about generally. They are one of the few places in a dense city where you get a clean horizon, a long unobstructed run and no traffic, which makes them useful for far more than skating.
