New York

Well...you caught me in a blogging mood. Thought I would include some New York photos. We went there in September with my family for a wedding. And we liked it so much that Ann and I went by ourselves again in November. We stayed at the same hotel and everything. It was very nice.

I haven't mastered the portrait shots, and I find that the inanimate objects will sit still no matter how many bad pictures you take. So most of these are not of people.

September

The castle my cousins had their reception in on Long Island.


Don't know these people...but seemed like a good picture.





I mean...it's the apple store. Totally picture worthy.


I have a fixation with these twirling M&M's. They just have a lot of photographic potential.








Ann was on the phone, so I was playing with some movement pictures. At first I tried some where the camera didn't move, but the subject did, so the cars would be blurry, but the backdrop still. Then I tried what's called Panning where I follow a subject during an exposure, ideally making it crisp, and the backdrop blurry. I was probably too ambitious with a .6 second exposure. That's got to be a pretty perfect follow. This was about as in focus as I got. There was one with a tire/fender that was pretty in focus. Okay...I guess I'll add it.

November

I had to revisit the stacked M&M's!


Took a stroll in Central Park. Great place to take pictures. Some nice views.


Speaking of nice views.






Made a point to make it to Serendipity this trip. It wasn't bad. A lot of hype with all of the movie references. There was of course a line. The food was expensive for its quality. But...never-the-less...still a fun stop.


With our hotel tickets we got two express passes for the Empire State Building. Ann was gracious enough to let the best picture time dictate when we used them. I figured this would be sunset. We couldn't make it there on time on Saturday, so the question was to use them later on Saturday, or wait until Sunday at sunset. We asked some of the workers in the line when the best time was to go. Sunset or Night. I had my new lens which was hopefully going to be fast enough to let me shoot at night. They said they were both good. But there was going to be some jazz people playing later that night. So we thought we'd go then.

The Jazz "band" was a guy on a saxophone. And the upstairs observation deck was not conducive to live bands/music anyway. So that didn't add anything for me. The night shots were also a little disappointing. They took my mono-pod away at security. And without a longer lens...I felt like there were TOO many lights to make many of the pictures interesting. And it was pretty cold and I didn't take time to think about how to be creative. But the moon with the Chrysler building seemed like it had a lot of potential.