I took a long weekend off because we actually left Chateau Steelypips for the first time in ages, and headed down to the greater NYC area for a couple of days. We stayed at my grandmother’s house in Nassau County (she’s living with my parents these days, so it’s otherwise empty, but well cared for by neighbors), and the original plan was to go to Jones Beach for a day. The weather wasn’t great, though, and both kids were very fired up to do something in The City, so on Saturday we headed into Manhattan.
This was complicated by the FDA still not having approved the Covid vaccine for kids The Pip’s age, so we weren’t comfortable doing anything that would be both indoors and crowded, so we pretty much just walked around: walking down the High Line for a bit, then over to Madison Square Park for lunch at Shake Shack, then back to the car. This was also an opportunity to indulge my expensive hobby of digital photography, taking pictures of Kate and the kids and general scenery:
As you can see from that, it was pretty overcast, the kind of day where taking pictures of buildings often ends up with the sky sort of blown out into a featureless void, where you actually do better by switching to greyscale:
Sunday was actively rainy in the morning, but cleared up to the same sort of grey as Saturday. Which was good, because we had tickets to go to the Bronx Zoo (which is doing timed entry as a Covid precaution). That produced a lot of animal photos, most pretty straightforward but some randomly artsy:
And one Twitter celebrity:
Probably my favorite picture of the lot was this shot of the people in the gorilla exhibit taking pictures of the gorillas:
Really, it’s the small child at the bottom of the frame that makes the shot for me— I have several versions without them, but this one where they marched through is the clear winner. I don’t know what’s up with the light that everyone else is so shadowed, but without the spotlit kid, it’s too dark.
I’m always a little ambivalent about taking pictures of other people in public, except for situations like this where they’re basically anonymous. I also really liked this one of a guy taking a picture of one of the many peacocks that roam the zoo:
I’m OK sharing this one, because the way he’s standing you can’t tell much about who he is. This is cropped from a wider shot where the woman he’s with (out of frame to the right) is just tolerating his photo break; that’s a better photo in a lot of ways, but she’s facing the camera pretty directly, so I would feel weird sharing it too widely.
That’s a tough thing about My Expensive Hobby: in many ways, people are the most interesting potential subjects for photography, but it’s very awkward to take pictures of strangers, and even more awkward to ask permission to take their pictures. I have no idea how people who do that kind of photography for a living manage.
So, while I end up with a lot of pictures of people, they’re mostly of my own family, who have mostly learned to put up with it. Some of those get randomly artsy, too:
And very rarely, they also include me:
Anyway, that’s what we’ve been up to. It was a good weekend and a much needed change of scenery, but has left us playing catch-up a bit, particularly as today’s the first day of school for the kids. More typical blog content will resume probably tomorrow, and big two-weeks-in-review posts this weekend.
Here are the traditional buttons:
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