Ugh. He's going to checkmate me in three moves….

nobody@flickr.com (Ed Yourdon) — Fri, 17 May 2013 04:34:02 -0700

Ed Yourdon posted a photo:

(Note: more details later, as time permits.)

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As I have noted in several earlier Flickr albums, as long as I continue going to the same NYC dentist, you can count on two or three sets of photos of Bryant Park each year. The reason is simple: my dentist is located in mid-town Manhattan, about a block from the park — and when I'm done, I'm always tempted to walk over and see how the park looks. Consequently, I've collected almost a dozen separate sets of Bryant Park photos, which you can see summarized here on Flickr. (At least one or two of those other sets will provide you with the historical details of the park; or you can look it up here on Wikipedia.)

In late April and early May of 2013, I took another stroll through the park, not having been there for nearly nine months -- but not because of a visit to the dentist, but because of another common excuse for being in this part of NYC: I was taking a photography class at the nearby International Center of Photography, and I had half an hour of spare time before my class began. It was still early spring summer, but the weather was mild, and the central lawn was green and completely empty, because the groundskeepers had roped it off to ensure the grass would finish growing before it gets trampled over by millions of visitors

I wandered mostly around the periphery of the park, looking for interesting scenes to capture with the Sony Alpha-65 and NEX-7 cameras that I happened to have with me. I locked the camera into a wide-angle setting and a fixed f/8 aperture, and I just pointed the camera in the general direction of an interesting scene, and pushed the shutter button. Of the few hundred shots that I took during these strolls, there were a handful that seemed worthy of uploading; that's what you'll be seeing in this set. All of this took roughly an hour, at the end of which I put away my camera, and wandered off to my class in the ICP building ...

96th Street subway station, May 2009 - #06

nobody@flickr.com (Ed Yourdon) — Sat, 09 May 2009 16:52:11 -0700

Ed Yourdon posted a photo:

Note: this photo was published in a Mar 15, 2011 blog titled "The Importance of Being in a Book."

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Over the years, I've seen various photos of the NYC subway "scene," usually in black-and-white format. But during a recent class on street photography at the NYC International Center of Photography (ICP), I saw lots and lots of terrific subway shots taken by my fellow classmates ... so I was inspired to start taking a few myself.

So far, I'm taking photos in color; I don't feel any need to make the scene look darker and grimier than it already is. To avoid disruption, and to avoid drawing attention to myself, I'm not using flash shots; but because of the relatively low level of lighting, I'm generally using an ISO setting of 800 or 1600.

I may eventually use a small "pocket" digital camera, but the initial photos have been taken with my somewhat large, bulky Nikon D300 DSLR. If I'm photographing people on the other side of the tracks in a subway station, there's no problem holding up the camera, composing the shot, and taking it in full view of everyone. But if I'm taking photos inside a subway car, I normally set the camera lens to a wide angle (18mm) setting, point it in the general direction of the subject(s), and shoot without framing or composing.

So far it seems to be working ... we'll see how it goes...

Uploads from Ed Yourdon, tagged concentration

Ugh. He's going to checkmate me in three moves….

96th Street subway station, May 2009 - #06