Posts tagged Prospect Heights

Not only were we in a hurricane, we were in a hurricane whose eye passed 250 feet from our house - corner of Washington Ave & St Marks Place in Brooklyn, according to the NOAA storm tracker. And what happened? A few downed branches. Lots of rain, that we slept through like babies, cat at our feet. And the next day, a neighborhood that looked far better than it did after the tornado that wreaked havoc last summer. Hurricane schmurricane. Category zero, you big wimp. And there I was posting on Facebook photos of the war-zone gear Regan and I had assembled the night before the storm, ready to fight our way to whatever story might happen in the 100 mph winds.

So the next day, after we had slept soundly through the whole thing, I took one of the cameras and went out in shorts and flip-flops, expecting to see something. Apparently our neighbors were also ready for Doomsday…

… and the good people at the (just opened and highly recommended) Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe on Vanderbilt Avenue had gone so far as to tape up the entrance to their basement. 

Well, in fact something had actually happened in the neighborhood. A few downed branches, here…

… but not enough to deter the people of Prospect Heights from reclaiming a still half-deserted Flatbush Avenue.

At the spectacularly ugly Richard Meier building on Grand Army Plaza, they had sandbagged the revolving doors, but that turned out to be overkill too.

So, nothing at all? Well, these unlucky motorists did have something on their hands - a tree, in fact, the only downed tree I could see in the neighborhood. “Waiting for the Fire Department?” I innocently asked one of them. “No way, baby! I’m gonna back up out of it!” he said, and promptly went back to ripping the smaller branches away with his hands. Don’t know if he succeeded, but he made me smile: This is New York, where hurricanes just scratch our paint and people move downed trees with their bare hands. Dumb, but so like the spirit of the city. “Whaddaya think I am, some kind of lumberjack?”, he seemed to say - and see you in 75 years, for the next statistically occurring hurricane.

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.