View allAll Photos Tagged spoilednyc
This was taken near the southwest corner of the Great Lawn, with the pond and Belvedere Castle in the background. I was trying to get a nice crisp shot of the four people in the foreground, but even on a "manual" setting, I just couldn't make it work … grr!
In case you're interested, the tall building in the far background is the Beresford luxury apartment building, located at 81st Street and Central Park West. Among the celebrities who have lived here in recent times are Jerry Seinfeld, Diana Ross, John McEnroe and Laura Nyro.
You can read more about it here on Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beresford
Note: I chose this as my "photo of the day" for October 1, 2013. And I chose it as the "best of the best" photo within this particular set.
Note: this photo was published in a Mar 1, 2015 blog titled "10 Enchantingly Beautiful Places That Don’t Feel Like You’re in NYC."
************************
As I wrote in another Flickr set a few years ago, you can be reasonably sure that there will be lots of interesting scenes to photograph in Central Park if you happen to visit when the weather is nice. My typical plan, on such photo expeditions, is to walk through and around several different parts of the park -- in order to see different groups of people, and also to take advantage of different scenes and backdrops. But it means that I don't spend very much time in any one place, and most of my shots end up being "ad hoc" in nature, with almost no planning, preparation, framing, or composition.
On this particular weekend in mid-September, I decided to restrict my wandering to just one area -- the "Great Lawn"; that's more-or-less in the center of the north-south expanse of the park. I walked around the sidewalk perimeter of the large grassy area, starting at the north end (because I had entered the park at 86th Street), heading down to the south end by the Delacorte Theater and the Belvedere Castle, and then back north again to my starting point.
I had a 16-50mm wide-angle zoom lens on my Sony Alpha-65 camera while I was walking, which made it relatively easy to capture some closeup scenes of people just a couple feet away from me. And I did take a few such photos, but my primary purpose was something altogether different: I wanted a change from the usual, hectic "street photography" situations in which I usually find myself, and instead find some nice wide-angle landscape shots where I could frame and compose the photos without worrying that the scene would change in a nanosecond. Indeed, what I really wanted was a few good panorama-style landscape shots taken from the north end of the Great Lawn, facing south across the expanse of the lawn itself, and framing the mid-town Manhattan skyline in the background.
And even that wasn't enough: I wanted to get some sunset and post-sunset photos, so I could take advantage of the late-afternoon/evening "golden light," as well as the dark blue/purple sky as the lights were being turned on in the buildings themselves. So I brought a tripod and a wireless remote … and for some reason, I decided to incorporate a bunch of HDR shots as well.
When I got home, I decided to review the Wikipedia article about the Great Lawn once again, to see if there was anything I had forgotten from earlier times. I didn't expect to find much, because -- as far as I knew -- the Great Lawn had always been part of Central Park, and had always been the same. But I had forgotten the historical development: as I read once again in Wikipedia, today's Great Lawn is situated on a flat area that was occupied by the 35-acre "Lower Reservoir" that was constructed in 1842 to supply water to the residents of the city. After the Croton-Catskill reservoir system was completed, the Lower Reservoir became redundant -- but political battles ensued for several decades before the city finally settled on a plan for an oval lawn.
That plan basically fell apart because of the Depression, and the open area was filled with a "Hooverville" of improvised shacks for quite some time. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia finally brought in the legendary Robert Moses (the visionary force behind so many other parks around New York City and the rest of the state) to implement the plan -- and it was essentially finished in 1934.
And there's more to the history, too, but I'll let you read that on your own if you're interested. (You might be interested to know, for example, that in 1995, Pope John Paul II held an open-air mass for 125,000 on the Great Lawn. Yes, it is that big!) Actually, the main reason I mention this is that I stumbled upon a massive collection of portable iron fences that were being set up all around the Great Lawn, as well as some frantic construction work taking place to erect a bandshell at the north end of the Lawn. There's a photo of it at the end of this small collection of photos, and there was a huge free concert a few days after my park stroll; I'll give you the details when I upload that photo in a few days...
In any case, I ended up at the north end of the Great Lawn, and hung around until well after dark as I captured a bunch of nice HDR shots. The twilight/office-building photos weren't so good, and I decided not to upload them to Flickr at all ...
Robert Indiana sculptures in Spanish, Hebrew & English are now on display along NYC's High Line elevated park outside Zaha Hadid's apartment building near 28th street in Chelsea.
The Spuyten Duyvil swing bridge open for river traffic at the joining of the Hudson and Harlem Rivers between Upper Manhatten and the Brox.
NYPD Counterterrorism Boat showing off for tourists in #BrooklynBridgePark. Named after fallen NYPD Detective Dillon Stewart. #nyc @NYPD #nypd @nycparks @brooklynbridgepark #eastriver #nyharbor #nypdscubateam #loves_nyc #IG_NYCITY @nyc.online #dream_new_york #seeyourcity #nycgo #thisisnewyork #spoilednyc #tv_buildings #topusa_ig #TheGlobeWanderer #earthfocus #OurPlanetDaily #sensational_architecture #nyconly #topusa #featcbnyc @go_NewYork_city #lowermanhattan #oneworldtrade #newyorkbygehry #bkn #brooklyn
A Manhattan D Train passes over the Manhattan Bridge high above the East River..
#nyc #manhattan #manhattanbridge #eastriver #DTrain #industrial #metal #architecture #bridge #brooklyn.
.
.
.
.
#loves_nyc #IG_NYCITY @nyc.online #dream_new_york #seeyourcity #nycgo #thisisnewyork #spoilednyc #tv_buildings #topusa_ig #TheGlobeWanderer #earthfocus #OurPlanetDaily #sensational_architecture #nyconly #topusa #featcbnyc @go_NewYork_city