"Eye Play”

"Eye Play”
David A. Ziser

One of my favorite things to do when visiting any big city is to shoot the urban landscape.  I love to look for the lines, shapes, and forms of the buildings. Then I crop in closely to isolate on one particular design aspect of that building or buildings.  I try to end up with some kind of abstract design that visually is just pleasing to explore. When you’re in a city like NYC, there’s lots of urban landscapes to photograph.  Here is one that I photographed yesterday while walking down Lexington Avenue.  I love the play of all the small rectangles against the framing of the two larger rectangular spaces.  Each rectangle had within it a smaller play of patterns that I thought added interest and texture to this cityscape.  I aligned the right side of my camera’s viewfinder with the leading right edge of the buildings.  I thought I would later correct the perspective in Photoshop, but decided that I liked the visual illusion of the composition “pulling” out from the top right corner of the image.  Just stare at the center of the image for a second or two and see if you don’t see what I’m talking about.  Something keeps telling me to FIX it, but by not doing so almost creates a visual “argument” with the viewer.  It’s this image’s “visual argument” that I think makes it an active vs. passive viewing experience.  Camera specs: Canon 7D fitted with 18-200mm IS lens at 50mm, F11 @ 1/500 second, ISO 200.  Enjoy!  -David