A few of my friends and I have big, fancy cameras and no idea what to do with them, so we decided to start a photo excursion club and take periodic jaunts in photogenic locations to improve our skillz.
Well, Anthony,
Jeff,
and I have big, fancy cameras. Jack has an iPhone. But he’s really serious with that iPhone:
We started out in Battery Park, which is just in front of our office building and has the most incredible views of Brooklyn, New Jersey, Ellis Island, and of course, the Statue of Liberty:
Look! Look! She’s in the foreground and background! See how clever I am?
We took about a zillion photos of flowers and bees landing on them (Anthony even tried to demonstrate to us that you can grab a bee and let it go before it realizes what’s going on, but after a few attempts, I think I convinced him he was going to lose a hand), but naturally I didn’t have my shutter speed set fast enough and didn’t capture a single good-looking shot.
Jack did manage to find some slower-moving wildlife, though:
We creepily watched other people’s kids play in the Battery Park fountain,
and saw a woman who may or may not have been Sinead O’Connor wearing a superhero costume play a concert inside Castle Clinton until the sun began to set:
We had been planning to walk up the East side of Manhattan, but the promise of the smoggy Jersey City moonlight drew us West to Battery Park City and the lovely promenade that spans its length. We stopped to watch a blues concert on the water, and I thought about how wonderful it is to live in a city where something like that is going on every second of the day.
Of course, it’s also the kind of city that commissions poop-shaped sculptures for its parks, so maybe it’s a trade-off:
Passing a group of chess tables, we jeered Anthony into planking (or “lying down game”, as Wikipedia calls it):
and then hilariously looked not ten feet away to see another dude copying him.
After that, Jack lost to himself in a sad game of imaginary chess, which I took a picture of:
and Anthony took a picture of:
and Jeff took a picture of (while accidentally using his color picker function, rendering about half of the photos he took black, white, and blue):
To show that he was more important than we are, Anthony pretended to assume professional photo-taking postures but was really just using them as an excuse to air out his crotch:
The sky went from blue
to black before we knew it
and we apropos-ly ended our photo expedition at the in-progress 9/11 memorial. Freedom Tower, as it was known. Or One World Trade, as we fondly call it:
We passed finance types lounging drunkenly at crowded outdoor cafes, collars unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up, and headed somewhere a little more our style:
Because as Jeff’s photos show, clearly we don’t know how to handle ourselves in public:
