Posts tagged Park Slope

I had great plans for Presidents’ Day. Get a zipcar and go explore the Far Rockaways, or find a new wildlife reserve upstate to go hiking, or at least shoot birds in Jamaica Bay. And then it snowed again overnight and the sky looked like a milky curtain, with a forecast for drizzle later. So, hiking plans got bagged, and out came my trusty Plan B: Prospect Park, where you can always find some fun if you’re willing to walk away from the beaten paths. 

This forsythia bush was planning an early flourish. Let’s see in ten days or so how things are going - right now, not too well.

The temperature was around freezing, but it takes a lot worse than that to discourage a Brooklyn jogger.

The lower half of this tree’s trunk was stripped of its bark, and it looked reddish compared to its neighbors. I turned my white balance down towards red a little to emphasize it. (How much down? Auto -2, on a D200 with a Sigma 30 f/1.4 lens, for my fellow Nikon geeks.)   

This hyperkinetic puppy ran towards me when I called her. And of course the autofocus was set to single shot, not the continuous following that would have actually put her in focus. Well, it’s still a halfway decent picture.

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Just after I snapped the dog picture I heard the rhythmic clicking of a horse’s hooves. Wait… horse? Yes, horse. I’ve seen them around the park other times too. I had to run to catch this rider, and she smiled graciously when I asked if I could take a few shots. I overexposed intentionally to get the black horse right, and that blew out the snow in the background… (+1/3 stop, for the photo geeks.) 

On my way back, I saw a dad pulling his kid on a sled. I played funny faces with the kid for a bit, and then the dad said something in what sounded like Swedish. The kid answered in International Toddler Baa-Baa Language, sounding like he wanted to say “This is fun!”

Last September’s disastrous storm has left many scars in the park. This is one of them.

Under the bridge that leads back to the Brooklyn Library, this girl looked like she was texting, and conveniently held still for a while, giving me a fitting shot to end the morning. Black & whiteing done in Photoshop.

As the blizzard started dropping snow on Brooklyn, I put on snow pants and grabbed a camera for a walk to Prospect Park. The battery died one hour in, and I was reminded of one basic tenet of digital photography: always bring a spare if you’re shooting in the cold. 

The lens was my old Sigma 30 f/1.4, a superfast little thing that has the added advantage, in driving snow, of not being a zoom: the lens barrel doesn’t extend, so no snowflakes get sucked in to melt later and do bad things to your camera’s electronic innards. 

Ford Falcon Futura parked near my house. An alliterative shot of red in a very somber palette.

Lonesome umbrella, Eastern Parkway 

Brooklyn Botanical Garden, entrance

Prospect Park 

Now this is how you play football!

Mother and daughter, speaking German.