We made it... we can scratch off the Big Apple from our bucket list, at least a little. A spur of the moment decision, a weekend in New York. That's all it was. Having 2.5 days in New York and try to fit as much as we can into it, was crazy. But we are like that, a little nuts. We hoped for a nice sunrise or sunset (we got both), and fairly good day in the city. The best part though was meeting new people. Dominick and his whole wonderful family was a wonderful host, even though we invaded their home, and wrecked a little havoc in their lives. They are beautiful people, that we will be in debt to, for a very long time. Thank you Dominick and thank you Niki, Zac and Kaden.
First day in Manhattan. What a day. Grand Central Station, Times Square, Central Park, the subway (and no sandwiches there, just lots of people), Brooklyn Bridge and a bit of Brooklyn. An adventure of a life time. Really. Apart for sore necks from craning at the hugeness of it all, and really sore feet from walking about 19km, we were happy. Since we were all walking together, it was difficult to create very different images. I was concentrating on the fisheye look, while Kasia took more conservative approach. We both really like the fisheye look, the distortions that this lens creates. Even though, it's not an easy lens to use, to create something interesting. The ease of it, is that for the most part, it's a lens you set and forget. Because of it's wide angle view, you can set it for 5.6-8 aperture, and infinity focus, and just point and shoot. Done.
Yes, of course there are tons of things to see, but if you are strapped for time you make choices, and see the iconic places, and try to replicate the iconic images that everyone makes. So that's what we did. It's our memories after all :)
Once we got to the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, we met up with Antonio Rosario from Switch2Manual podcast. I've been listening to that podcast for a while now, and discovered Antonio's street photography, which is quite amazing. So since we were in New York, why not meet up, as he puts it, in "meatspace". So we did, and I run into a bit of a problem. Because I was chatting so much, I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the fisheye lens. It must have moved off it's infinity setting, or the aperture switched, because most of the New York city scapes from Brooklyn Park, were just slightly out of focus. I blame it on being tired, excited, and a complete twat, photographically speaking of course :)
It's really hard not to write more, as the whole day of adventuring with cameras in great company through New York, is a trip of a life time. I just wished we had more time to discover the city better, and spend more time on creating better photographs. Even though we have never met Dominick, nor Antonio before, we chatted and emailed before, and it felt like meeting old friends again.
We shot a lot of images so I thought it would be good to combine our images into a single post. Good luck finding Kasia's Sony and my Fuji images :).... there will be more, much more in next post. Remember to click on the images for full size.
