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My two favorite photography books about New York are David Bradford’s Drive by Shootings : Photographs by a New York Taxi Driver and Harvey Wang’s New York.

You might have noticed a decorative border that I almost always put around my photographs. I first seen it in Harvey Wang’s book. I asked my photography professor in college about how that effect was achieved. She explained to me that Wang took his negative holder and filed down the edges. This projected not only the picture from the negative, but also a little bit of the edge and film sprockets onto the paper. Besides looking cool and framing the picture nicely this also was a way of showing off – this shows that none of his photographs were cropped. It’s like he was saying – look, my framing is perfect, cropping is for wussies. I am a wussie. I crop like there is no tomorrow. And since I am only using digital these days, I rely on a Photoshop plugin called Extensis Photoframe.