Behold, my second collection of photographs from NYC, taken over the past few days of blistering July sunlight. In order to keep things interesting, some of the chronology is inter-mingled with the first set.
So far we have continued to meander the streets, taking in the various sights. Not necessarily the traditional sights mind you, but those that are more organic; the kind of thing that give the city some kind of living character. New York is full of it.
Since I published the last set of pictures, we headed along the ‘High Line’, which is a public park that runs the length of an old elevated train line. While you can still see evidence of the tracks here and there, the space has been taken over by greenery. Every so often there’s a break in the verdure, and you get rather impressive views over the city, or space to cool off.
Despite it allegedly getting cooler since I’ve been here, it certainly didn’t feel like it, and we had to punctuate our roving ambulation with routine stops for sustenance.
I spotted a shop adorned with Union flags and had to stop to investigate.
I must say that the sheer abundance of these particular flags was not a particularly welcome sight. However, I was given pause by the presence of a particular orange beacon of hope sitting in the window. Unfortunately, I had not stumbled upon a full-sugared holy grail, but rather one of the newer, sweetener-laced monstrosities. Probably just as well anyway, since the place was shut.
We saught solace from the omni-present heat at an immersive art installation called the ‘Color Factory’, which included an ensemble of visual delights… including a large, blue ball pit. The pictures from there will be sprinkled through the rest of this post, to avoid overwhelming your senses all at once.
At some point we found ourselves outside of the world famous Madison Square Gardens arena, where a whole bunch of WWE trucks were stationed.
Take a closer look at the wheels on this thing…
Surely that can’t be legal.
I thought I would move away from the Ricoh GR and try shoot more with the Leica M240, to vary the kind of pictures I was taking. To be honest though, in practice the GR is so much better for street pictures that this hasn’t quite shaken out.
One of my favourite things I’ve noticed a lot is people reading books on the subway. Journeys here can be fairly long, so this makes sense. There’s something rather pleasant about the visual of a novel as opposed to a sea of phones though.
My big plan was to shoot a whole bunch of black and white film on this trip, but I’ve literally not shot a single frame with the Nikon S2 yet. I packed a pile of Kodak Double X, which is ISO 200 as I expected things to be pretty sunny, but you forget that in cities like New York there are always harsh contrasts of light due to the tall buildings, which makes that kind of switcheroo difficult.
Stay tuned for more.
The rims on that truck reminds me of Death Race.
Yes!!!