Buddy's Sports Bar NYC
Buddy’s is a fun sports bar located at 26th and 3rd ave in Manhattan. The concept is in the name of the establishment and I have to admit that it’s genius in its simplicity. Buddy’s is a bar for buddies who want to watch sports together. Everything about the place is fun and full of cute well thought out details. From the explosion of sports memorabilia that adorn the walls to the hot dog tower and championship trophy punch bowl drink that’s meant to be shared. With your buddies.
The main focus of this photoshoot was the interiors. The space itself is the main selling point of this bar. It’s designed to be bright colorful and explosive. There are trophies, old jerseys, polaroids, bobble heads, collectors edition cups, autographed posters and any and all sports memorabilia imaginable. Every little corner of the bar is an explosion of fun details. Which somehow doesn’t distract from the fact that there are TV’s everywhere. With every game imaginable on them. No matter where you are in the bar you’re in close eyesight of at least 4 games playing simultaneously all at once. When photographing an interior such as this my focus is on capturing EVERYTHING. It wasn’t hard to decide to shoot bright colorful photographs with high contrast. Choosing the widest lenses that I could possibly use without distorting the space too much. And aiming for as much depth of field as possible. I didn’t want to miss any of the little details. For lighting I used a pop of strobe carefully positioned. Soft lights either positioned behind the camera to eliminate shadows or in line with the natural light coming from the windows at the front of the bar. I was also lucky that this bar had such a nice warm glow to it that I could use to accent.
The challenges for a shoot like this are the TV’s. For most of the shots I opted to retouch them in later rather than relying on whatever was on the TV’s at the time. All told I must have had to replace several hundred TV screens across all the photographs that we took. AI can be a useful tool but still not quite there yet when it comes to doing delicate photography work. Another challenge was the mirrors strategically placed all over the bar. It’s a useful tool when you want to make a space appear bigger that I even use in the interior design of my own home space. But it also makes positioning camera, lighting and even myself difficult at times. When shooting I had to be careful not to accidentally take a self portrait or capture the owner Ken in one of the reflections. But for the majority of these shots I opted to shoot tethered to my laptop and could review the final product instantly as I was shooting it. Doing this makes it so easy to correct any mistakes or unwanted reflections before the editing process.
