Ilford Delta 3200 Pro 120 - Yashica D - NYC Subway Images

One of the things I enjoy most about going to NYC is experiencing the things that we don't have in Cleveland. While we do have great public transportation, we have nothing that compares to the NYC subway system. It's easy for me to become engrossed in watching the people. There are people who ride on a daily basis, tourists who are new to the system, people who are riding to get somewhere and others who are just riding. There seems to even be an entirely different set of accepted behaviors and social interactions - it's not at all unlike riding in an elevator with strangers.

Of course, since I find the subway so fascinating, it's not surprising that I took the many trips in and out of the city as an opportunity to shoot. This type of photography (actually most of the photography from this trip) is really not my usual style. I would liken this more to street photography - which is a style I've always admired but never really been able to grasp personally, but, I think I see little hints of success in my more recent work. I attribute part of that to being more comfortable with my analog cameras but also to being more willing to shoot those images of unknown people - realizing now that it's often those people and their interactions with the camera that make good street photography good.

For reference, all of the images in this post were taken with my Yashica D TLR - a camera that I have come to love more and more as the results that I get from this camera are always fantastic. The film of choice for these subway photos is of course a high ISO film - Ilford Delta 3200 Pro - which allowed me to shoot handheld in the darker parts of the subway. This was actually my first experience with this Ilford 3200 and I'm surprised by how little grain there actually is in the scans. For such a high ISO film I expected to find much grainier images. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it and will likely shoot with it again in the near future.