Look at this guy I just photographed! Isn’t he the dreamiest guy you’ve ever seen?

Look at this guy I just photographed! Isn’t he the dreamiest guy you’ve ever seen?


Image by Ed Yourdon
Note: this photo was published in an undated (Mar 16, 2011) Everyblock NYC zipcodes blog titled "10036."

Note: I chose this photo, among the ten that I uploaded to Flickr on the evening of Mar 16, 2011, as my "photo of the day." I thought the arrangement of the three girls was classic, almost as if it had been formally posed. But it wasn’t — they were behaving quite naturally, and had no idea that I was photographing them.

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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. But this particular visit (and one or two others in this collection) had nothing to do with my dentist: I was on a lunch-break from a weekend class at the International Center of Photography, located about a block away. It was a relatively mild late-winter Saturday, and I was feeling somewhat claustrophobic after spending the entire morning in a small windowless basement-level classroom; so I opted to skip my lunch meal, and just wandered around the park taking pictures.

After surveying the scene, I decided to make at least one circumnavigational loop, to photograph whatever looked interesting. Actually, there wasn’t much alternative: the central lawn had been completely torn up, and roped off to keep people away. I think they’re going to be laying down new sod/grass for the spring season … but in any case, everyone was confined to the chairs and tables around the edge of the park.

Of course, there were lots of people reading books, chatting on their cell phones, and carrying on conversations with one another. But there was there was something else going on, to a far greater extent than I recall ever seeing here in the park before: people sound asleep. A couple of the people looked like homeless vagabonds, but most were well-dressed middle-class people who had simply decided, for whatever reason, to stretch out in a chair or lay their face and upper torso down on a table … and drift off to sleep. So I took a few pictures of the people, as well as a few unusual displays of affection.

All of this was shot with my simple Canon G12 camera, instead of the various large, bulky DSLR cameras that I normally use. The main advantage of the G12 is that it’s small and unobtrusive; and because it has a swivel (or "reticulating") LCD monitor, I can tilt it so that I’m looking down toward my feet while pointing the camera lens at an unsuspecting subject, who might be only a few feet away. Thus, instead of hurriedly firing off three or four shots with my Nikon D700, and hoping that one of them might produce good results, I could take my time with the G12, and get a single well-composed picture. Over the course of two weekends, I ended up taking a little over 250 photos, of which 100 survived the editing process, and will be uploaded here to Flickr over the next several days…

At the end of a one-hour lunchtime each day, I turned off the camera, and headed back up the street to my ICP class. But I’ll be back to see my dentist next month, and I’ll try to stop by the park again, to see what it looks like when spring has returned …

Tags: dreamiest, ever, Isn't, just, look, photographed, seen, this, you've