Some trips are memorable and some trips are unforgettable. I have been to the New York city quite a few times and each time with a different purpose. Sometimes I go there to visit my friends, sometimes just for the restaurant hopping, sometimes for a work related activities and sometimes I go there just for the shooting. But the last trip was a combination of all and probably the last one of its kind in many ways. It was a fun trip with an emotionally drenched ending. If you skim through my photo gallery, you would quickly notice that I love to take night cityscapes and have been to NYC few times just for those night cityscapes. Usually, I would like to take such trips alone so that I could get out and go for the shoot wherever I want and whenever I want. But occasionally, I would get a company and trips would bring out different dimensions of me as a photographer and as a person in general. Having an extra pair of eyes and creative mind is always helpful. When I do these night cityscapes, I would always go through my checklist of things to do for the long exposure shots and works every single time. Here is the shot from the trip.
New York downtown from the Brooklyn Bridge park
Good thing about the trips to NYC is that there is always something new and no matter how many times you capture this magnificent city, there is always a new building popping up and you would always find an interesting angle to shoot from. But since the global pandemic hit all of us and the cities around the world started lockdown in early 2020, many photographers including myself haven’t been able to travel much. Some photographers that I have talked to told me that they are finally getting time to finish their editing projects that have been pending from years, some say they are finally learning how to edit in digital platform and some say, they are now experimenting shooting indoors and learning to shoot using studio strobes and flash units which all are great ways to stay positive and get creative.
Since many of you know that I work as an IT professional full time and photography is my hobby and my way to escape from the computer terminals. But since last year, I was forced to spend more time in front of a computer which led me thinking of doing something creative with it. And after giving much thought, I decided to start a YouTube channel and share the knowledge and the experience I have gained as an IT professional over the last 15 years. By doing so, I am hoping that it provides some guidelines and meaningful resources to those who are just starting their career in IT field specially as a system/network administrator or cybersecurity engineer. If you are one of those IT nerds, I invite you to check out the channel and would love to get your feedbacks as well. Even though I love to take pictures, I am a camera shy person myself and it was the reason I never started a YouTube channel for photography. But while creating videos for this channel, I could hide behind the terminals and let my keyboards and monitors lift those heavyweights for me.
I had never used any video editing tools before but recently I discovered a program called Shotcut which is an open source and completely free video editing tool. I highly recommend it to you if you don’t want to spend lots of money on video editing software. You can download and install it and see if it works for you or not. I believe the workflow for other paid software is also similar and practicing on this free version gives you an idea if you need upgrade to the paid software or not. So far, it is working great for me and does what I need to produce videos for my channel. And if you need help using the software, there are tons of helpful articles and YouTube videos explaining the tools and the features of the software.
Stay safe, stay happy and keep shooting!