Sunday, November 15, 2009

Central Park

Okay, sorry if you kept checking my blog to see more pictures--I kept running out of time to update everything! So here are a few pictures from around Central Park. Nothing spectacular, but I had fun exploring more of the city. On Halloween Day, a couple of friends and I walked through the park, taking pictures of whatever we could. Sadly, a large part of my pictures were slightly out of focus (I think the spot focus got shifted), and I didn't notice until after I got back.

But today I got back from church a lot earlier than normal because of stake conference. After a much-needed nap, I decided to go read in Central Park. I was able to find an open bench next to the Pool on the north end of the park, and I just sat and read for almost two hours (the "Pool" is a small pond, in case you were wondering).

In other news, I was sad to see BYU lose to TCU, but thrilled to see Utah do the same. And wearing my BYU hoodie around New York City has led to some interesting comments. On Friday night, some random guy stopped to ask me, "Is BYU that school with the women's soccer game? That one that's been all over the news?" I knew exactly what he was talking about (the slapping, punching, hair-pulling game when the BYU women's soccer team played New Mexico), so we talked for a couple of minutes about sports (and BYU in particular--I felt bad that I didn't have a pass-along card).

And I can't believe I'm almost done with my first semester here at NYU. It has gone by a lot quicker than I expected. Right now, I've finished all of the mid-term assignments, so all I have left to do are the final papers in each of my classes. I am going to try and get at least a rough draft done for one of my final classes--if I can spread things out over the end of the semester here, I won't get slammed with having to turn in three big writing assignments on the same day. Hopefully, I don't get too distracted with Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up...

A tree
(ha, okay, I couldn't resist being just a little bit sarcastic...)


Hmm...I don't remember what statue this was. It's a little bit south of Bethesda Fountain.


This picture is really strange to me--I have no clue who this guy was, and I don't even know when the last time the stage was used. I just thought it looked kind of odd.


I don't know if you can tell, but the woman was having a hard time going up the stairs--it looked like they had been walking around for most of the day


This is what the trees looked like in Central Park--I'll try and get some more pictures before all of the leaves come down

Okay, this probably isn't going to be that interesting to everyone, but I was pretty excited that this picture came out. It was a little after 5:00pm (the sun set at like 4:45pm), and I was getting ready to head back to my apartment. The leaves were almost completely dark. Anyway, an ambulance was cutting through the park, and I did some quick guesses on ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. I didn't have a tripod with me, so I propped the camera on the bench and hoped like crazy my hand didn't move. If you look closely, you can see several bright starbursts in the ambulance's light trail--it's from the rotating light hitting the camera lens at different intervals.