Matt Mawson does a fantastic job capturing Coney Island, New York CIty's perfect escape for children and families. I love the choice of color and saturation in these photos. It's not quite the bright and shiny colorful escape you would use to higlight a place, but it works well in this series.

Matt on this project:

"I really don't know what to say in that time was quite tight when I went there on a really hot day last summer and the method of picture taking is generally the same whatever I do. I come from a photo-journalist background so I shoot quite rapidly darting from one place to another shooting whenever an opportunity presents itself which sometimes means shooting from the hip as it were. I am always on the lookout for a person wandering into a scene that may catch my eye and sometimes hoping for an unexpected moment or a happy accident and I sometimes place myself somewhere graphically pleasing expecting something to happen. The images taken of Coney Island funfair from the subway were shot from the hip at speed as I saw the scene flash passed and was lucky they worked, But I suppose long experience working in some dangerous places means you have to kind of see things out the corner of your eye and react. So many images have been shot at Coney Island so you have to try and do something different otherwise why bother.  

Coney Island, to me, suggests a kind of down at heal location and colourless but fascinating all the same as it has been alluded to in so many songs and images so in post production I de-saturated the images a bit and added a fair amount of contrast an added a slight sepia tone to the shadows until I got what you see. I used there a Canon 5d2 and a bit of fill-flash from a small Canon speedlight, forgotten the name but the smallest they do."