A past project · 2025

Shutter Speed Explores: Manhattan, Volume 1

A photo book by Alex Zarnoski and Jon Bilous

Shutter Speed Explores: Manhattan, Volume 1 was our first photo book, and the first in a planned series featuring travel and documentary photography. We both lived and shot in New York City for years, so we pulled from hundreds of our own Manhattan photos. We curated and sequenced them over many screen-sharing sessions, until the book read as one walk through the city.

The finished book is a compact 6" x 9", with one photograph per page. It opens with a preface written in a nod to Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac. The cover is a mirrored image of the Manhattan Bridge on a smoky evening. We designed, self-published, and marketed it ourselves in 2025, and learned a lot along the way.