Finding wildlife, movement, art and inspiration in one of the busiest cities in the world
Introduction
New York City is probably not the first place that comes to mind when you think about bird photography.
For me, that was part of the reason I wanted to experience it.
Most of my bird photography happens in places where nature dominates the landscape—forests, coastlines, wetlands and open spaces. New York reverses that relationship. Here, pockets of nature exist within one of the most recognizable and energetic cities in the world.
On my trip, I spent time birding in Central Park, but I also wanted to explore something beyond simply finding and photographing birds.
I wanted to be creative again.
New York is a city that seems to encourage that. Everywhere you look there is photography, architecture, design, music, fashion and art. People are constantly making something, photographing something or looking at the city from their own perspective.
I found myself doing exactly the same thing.
One minute I was looking through the trees for a bird. A few hours later I was photographing the Empire State Building through a crowd of people. Then I was experimenting with reflections, motion blur or the shape of a building against the sky.
It became less of a traditional birding trip and more of an exercise in seeing.
And in a strange way, photographing New York reminded me of many of the things I love about photographing birds.
Birding in the Middle of Manhattan
Central Park is one of those places that almost doesn't make sense until you experience it.
You can be surrounded by traffic, buildings and people, walk a short distance beneath the trees, and suddenly your attention shifts completely.
Instead of watching taxis, you're watching the canopy.
Instead of listening to horns, you're trying to pick a bird call out of the background noise.
During spring migration, I spent hours walking the park looking for birds moving through the fresh leaves. The contrast between wildlife and Manhattan was one of my favourite parts of the experience.
There was also something different about photographing birds here.
I wasn't trying to make Central Park look like some untouched wilderness. The city is part of the story.
A bird flying between buildings, a pigeon passing the Empire State Building, or leaves framing a skyline can say just as much about wildlife as a perfectly clean portrait.
These birds are living within the city.
I wanted some of the photographs to show that.
Looking for Birds Differently
When I normally head out for bird photography, I can become very focused.
Find the bird.
Watch its behaviour.
Find the background.
Find the light.
Wait for the moment.
That approach still worked in Central Park, but New York encouraged me to loosen up a little.
Sometimes the bird didn't need to fill the frame.
Sometimes it could simply become another element in a much larger photograph.
One of my favourite examples was photographing pigeons around the Empire State Building. Instead of separating the bird from everything around it, I started looking for ways to combine the two.
The bird became foreground.
The architecture became habitat.
Suddenly I wasn't really making a photograph of a pigeon. I was making a photograph about a bird living in New York City.
That small shift completely changes how you see an ordinary species.
The City Made Me Want to Create
There are places that make you want to take photographs.
New York is one of them.
I could walk the same block multiple times and see a different photograph every time.
A reflection would appear in a window.
Steam would begin pouring into the street.
Someone would cross through a small opening between buildings.
A yellow taxi would suddenly provide the only bright colour in the frame.
Light would hit the top of a building while the street remained in shadow.
The city never really stops changing.
That reminded me of wildlife photography.
A bird might sit on the same branch for ten minutes, but the photograph can change instantly when it turns its head, opens its wings or moves into a small pocket of light.
In both situations, photography becomes less about controlling what is happening and more about recognizing the moment when everything briefly comes together.
From Central Park to the Streets
I didn't want to put the camera away once the birding was finished.
That became one of the most enjoyable parts of this trip.
Normally, after spending a morning photographing wildlife, I might be finished shooting for the day. In New York, leaving Central Park simply meant entering an entirely different photographic environment.
The same patience I use with birds started translating into street photography.
Instead of finding a perch and waiting for a bird, I found a composition and waited for a person.
I might see an interesting background, reflecting between buildings, and then simply stand there.
Eventually someone would walk into exactly the right place.
A taxi would pass.
A cyclist would enter the frame.
Something unexpected would happen.
It was a very familiar photographic process applied to a completely unfamiliar subject.
Finding Order in the Chaos
New York can be visually overwhelming.
There are people, signs, cars, buildings, construction, lights and movement everywhere.
Trying to photograph everything usually resulted in photographing nothing.
So I started looking for ways to simplify it.
Frames within frames became particularly interesting. I used buildings, streetlights, windows, trees and even other people to create layers around my subject.
Longer focal lengths also allowed me to compress distant parts of Manhattan together, making the city feel even denser. During my previous field test, I found that telephoto lenses let me isolate small moments and create cleaner compositions within the surrounding chaos.
That idea carried throughout this trip.
Instead of asking, How do I photograph New York?
I started asking, What small piece of New York can I photograph right now?
That was much more interesting.
Letting Things Blur
Wildlife photography teaches you to chase sharpness.
Fast shutter speeds.
Sharp eyes.
Frozen wings.
Perfect detail.
New York made me want to do the opposite.
I started slowing my shutter speed and allowing people to move through otherwise static compositions.
Inside museums, visitors became almost ghostlike as they walked past paintings and dinosaur skeletons.
On the street, pedestrians blurred against buildings that remained perfectly still.
Rather than photographing what the scene literally looked like, motion blur gave me a way to photograph what the city felt like.
Busy.
Fast.
Temporary.
Always moving.
I'd explored this during my earlier New York camera testing as well, particularly the contrast between detailed stationary architecture and moving subjects dissolving around it.
This time, it felt less like a technical experiment and more like part of how I wanted to tell the story.
A Different Kind of Wildlife Photography
One of the things I've learned from photographing wildlife is that nature doesn't disappear because we've built a city around it.
You just have to start noticing it.
Birds fly between skyscrapers.
Pigeons navigate traffic and crowds.
Raccoons live inside Central Park.
Migrating songbirds stop to feed while millions of people move around them.
Trees become small pieces of habitat surrounded by concrete.
New York makes that relationship incredibly visible.
There were moments when I could photograph a bird and one of the most recognizable buildings in the world in essentially the same composition.
For me, those photographs became some of the most interesting images of the trip.
They aren't traditional wildlife portraits.
They're environmental photographs in the most literal sense—the environment just happens to be Manhattan.
Visiting the Museums
Creativity wasn't limited to being behind the camera.
I also spent time walking through New York's museums.
Standing beneath enormous dinosaur skeletons or seeing famous artwork in person forces you to slow down in a completely different way.
At The Met, I found myself looking not only at the artwork, but at how other people interacted with it.
People would stop.
Study something.
Photograph it.
Move on.
That movement became part of my photographs.
Instead of trying to photograph a completely empty gallery, I experimented with slower shutter speeds and allowed visitors to blur through the scene while the artwork remained still.
There was something fitting about it.
The artwork has been there for generations.
We pass through for a few seconds.
Seeing Van Gogh in Person
Seeing The Starry Night in person is one of those moments where I mostly just wanted to stand there and look at it. It is my favourite painting, and i have been lucky enough to see it a couple of times.
As photographers, we spend so much time thinking about cameras, lenses and technique that it's easy to forget how important it is to consume other kinds of art.
Painting doesn't have autofocus.
It doesn't have shutter speed.
There isn't a burst mode waiting to capture the perfect instant.
Yet many of the same ideas are there.
Colour.
Movement.
Balance.
Light.
Emotion.
Where your eye enters an image and where it travels afterward.
I don't think inspiration for photography has to come from other photographers.
Sometimes looking at a painting can make you think differently about a bird.
Creativity Comes Back With You
That might have been the biggest takeaway from this trip.
I went to New York excited about photographing birds, but I came home thinking more about photography itself.
Bird photography will always be where I feel most at home.
But creativity shouldn't become restricted by the subject you are known for photographing.
Street photography made me think more about layers.
Architecture made me think about lines and scale.
Motion blur made me think about movement.
Museums made me think about colour and visual storytelling.
And birding in Central Park reminded me that wildlife photographs don't always need to remove every sign of the human world.
All of those ideas can come back into my wildlife photography.
Photograph What a Place Feels Like
There are thousands of photographs of the Empire State Building.
There are millions of photographs of New York.
There are countless photographs of pigeons.
The challenge isn't simply finding something that hasn't been photographed before.
It's finding your own way to photograph it.
Maybe that's a pigeon crossing the skyline.
Maybe it's a skyscraper reflected in a puddle.
Maybe it's a person disappearing through a museum while a painting remains perfectly still.
Or maybe it's a tiny migrating bird resting in Central Park with Manhattan surrounding it.
That's what I enjoyed most about this trip.
New York gave me permission to photograph everything.
Not because every frame needed to become a portfolio image, but because every frame was another opportunity to experiment.
Conclusion
I went to New York to photograph birds.
I came home inspired by a city.
Central Park gave me the wildlife experience I was looking for, but the streets, architecture, museums, people and constant movement changed the way I approached the trip.
I stopped separating bird photography from street photography, cityscapes or art.
It was all photography.
It was all observation.
It was all about slowing down enough to notice something interesting and then figuring out how I wanted to show it.
For a wildlife photographer, sometimes one of the best ways to become more creative in nature is to spend a little time photographing something completely different.
New York City gave me exactly that.
– Jared VanderMeer
