I'll just come out and say it... living in New York City makes you lazy! I'll be the first to admit it. You never have to leave your apartment. You can make a phone call and have anything and everything delivered to your door. Food, pizzas, groceries, books, DVDs, whatever... It's so bad that I can calll my buddy Mike at the local bodega at 3AM and have him deliver me a Snickers bar if I feel like it. Not that I ever have, but I could. I'm just sayin'...
And my current freelancer lifestyle, where I don't have to go to an office or even step foot outside my living room to go to work, doesn't help matters much. There've been times where I haven't gone outside at all. I think my longest stretch was five days. There was no need to leave, especially when Mutsumi will do the laundry and throw out the garbage. It's great when it's rainy or snowing or you're sick, but I've gotten too used to it. And I'll be the first to admit that's not a healthy lifestyle to lead, both physically and/or mentally, so I'm making a move to change that.
Mutsumi just bought a beautiful new camera. Her new pride and joy! If I knew anything about cameras, I could tell you all about it, but all I know is that it's the kind of camera that I see professionals use on TV photographing models and wild animals and weddings. But that means I inherited her old point-and-click Sony Cybershot. And all I know now is that I want to take pictures!
So what I've decided to do, in order to get my ass in gear and out of the house, is to go out into the city to take pictures. Every day, I'm going to explore a bit and take pictures of New York. And in order to stay motivated and keep me on the straight and narrow with this, I'll be posting one of these pictures here daily. A buddy of mine who recently started a blog wrote to tell me how much he likes it because giving something a public forum, where people expect updates, keeps you working at it. It's totally true and that's what I hope to do here.
A quick warning though... I usually suck at taking pictures and have no experience at it whatsoever. I have no idea what I'll find on the streets everyday to take shots of, but I'm gonna try it out and see how it goes. I'm sure somedays will be more interesting than others, but I'm just looking forward to the experiment. So here we go...
This struck as me as a good first post as it seems very New York to me for several reasons. I walked out of my building and it was sunny and 80 with not a cloud in the sky. I turned the corner only to find the sidewalk covered in scaffolding and it sounded like it had started pouring rain all of a sudden. Turns out they were power-washing the building above and all the dirty water was running down off the building, over the scaffolding and onto the street, as you can see here. The fact that it was falling over a BODIES exhibit poster which was on display next to a dumpster struck me as funny. The other New York elements in the shot, like the phone booth, the fire hydrant, the mailbox, the ladder and the one-way street sign all really add to the big city feel, if you ask me. And yes, we even have yellow school buses here as you can see!
