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| Central Park sunrise |
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| Top of The Rock |
Getting my wife a Christmas gift is truly a stressful experience. She always says she “doesn’t need anything,” which of course is code for “don’t disappoint me...”
I usually run out to the 7-11 late on the 24th (just kidding, they close early) to pick up some special little something, but this year I thought I would really knock her socks off and purchased box seats to Andrea Bocelli at the MET in NYC performing the day before Valentine’s. I arranged the flight, hotel and picked up premium tickets via Stub Hub, which I believe cost more than the entire aforementioned.
The ambiance of the MET was spectacular. Men in sharp Armani suits and ladies draped in some type of endangered fur worth more than our house. My wife looked great in her evening attire and I looked somewhat put together in my suit, which I’m pretty sure I wore for my grade 12 grad.
Even though my wife is a doctor and I am, well, not a doctor, we felt a little like frauds in the company of New York’s elite. Nevertheless, we nursed our $35 cocktail and enjoyed the concert in box seats only meters from the stage.
While my wife was engrossed in the performance, most likely wondering why I couldn’t sing to her like that or had some more Italian blood in me, I was more consumed by thinking of what great HDR shots I could get in this place. But I couldn’t help but thinking that the sound of seven consecutive rapid fire shots from my D3S (which of course was in the hotel room, anyway) might be perceived as a little distracting in this almost impeccably perfect acoustic facility.
The only more impeccable thing was my timing. For you see the second most stressful occurrence in my life is what to get her for Valentine’s Day. This gift, of course, solved both dilemmas quite nicely.
During our post performance dinner, probably at a Sabaro’s since we were already dressed for the occasion, I posed the philosophical and unrealistic question: would Andrea trade his remarkable gift of singing to be able to see? No right or wrong answers, just your typical dinner conversation.
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| Chrysler Building at dawn |
We have been to NYC several times and it is undeniably my most favorite place in the world. I have established a little 15-20 km walking loop we do each time that takes you to all of the cliche landmarks of The City That Never Sleeps. And seeing that I lost all my previous NYC pics in The Great Hard Drive Crash of ’09 (who knew you should back up your files...), I needed to revisit most of the sites again, anyway.
February 14 was an extremely cold day and of course we picked that day to venture to the furthest point of the loop - The Brooklyn Bridge. There is a great photo op spot under the bridge, Promenade Park, that was our intended destination, but even though I have been there before, a fading memory and acute orientation dysfunction I possess, got us lost for awhile. Not recommended in -10 temperatures.
We eventually found it and then the curse happened again. We have traveled to many destinations around the world and I have a scientifically proven inevitability that I call The Law of Scaffolding. It is a complex, but accurate formula.
Renovation planners of any landmark, monument, or historic building that I really want to photograph, will pick the precise moment we are visiting to perform major structural enhancements to these exteriors, usually involving multiple levels of scaffolding. The Brooklyn Bridge was no exception.
While I worked my composition around the building materials that obscured most of the bridge, it wasn’t quite the same. Like having to shoot half the Eiffel Tower, which reminds me we are going to Paris in June. DOH!
Shortly after going through Little Italy, somewhere near SOHO I believe, my eye caught a familiar sight. Not an historic monument or building, but the unmistakable yellow and black Nikon camera strap with the D3X wordmark emblazoned on it. This couldn’t be any ordinary point-and-shoot photographer. And it wasn’t.
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| Little Italy |
I knew exactly who it was and raced up to him as if I were a 12 year old girl who had just sighted Justin Bieber. I was star struck and tongue tied. In the presence of greatness. “Scott Kelby,” I proclaimed, “I’m Alex Hill from Canada and I am a big fan of your work.” “No,” he replied, but before he could state the obvious, I realized that for some inexplicable reason I had just called a true photography icon - a legend who has shot for the likes of National Geographic, SI, Life, etc... - by a name that was stuck in my head at the time (having just watched a Scott Kelby tutorial on photographing in NYC a couple of days before).
“My name is Joe McNally...,” he politely corrected me.
Wonderful. A once in a lifetime encounter with someone who’s really inspired me and I come across as a sweaty palmed psycho-stalker. We shook hands, he backed away slowly, and we went on our separate ways. I felt ill. My wife, who already thinks I have issues carrying around 40 pounds worth of camera and lens equipment, half of which I don’t use, was sincerely embarrassed for me.
Joe, in the unlikely event that you or anyone else outside my immediate family ever reads this blog, please accept my apologies.
On Valentine’s evening we went to the Top of The Rock (Rockefeller Center observation deck) to watch the sun setting over Manhattan and see the Empire State Building light up in its traditional red illumination to commemorate the occasion. The view is simply spectacular. Not as high, but better than the view from the ESB, in my opinion. And we didn’t have to wait the usual four hours in the serpentine line ups that are common at the ESB. We went right up.
Other highlights of the trip included watching Jersey Boys, fourth row, center. What a production! It was one of those moments where you can escape from reality for a couple of hours and leave feeling really good about life. You also leave with a deep void, realizing how, what’s he word for it, “untalented” you actually are. The energy and passion these performers display each night is inspiring.
I felt the same way after watching Joseph and His Amazing, blah, blah, blah, and yes, even Mama Mia. There I said it. I spent most of the seventies turning off the radio when Abba music was playing, then 35 years later I’m tapping my toes and singing along to it. Mental note: need intervention stat.
Jersey Boys is the story of The Four Seasons and their rise to prominence in the early sixties until, like almost every other group of the time, took a back seat to four young lads from across the pond who would change the music scene forever.
Which brings us to the next highlight: being part of the studio audience for a David Letterman Show. It’s quite the process, but well worth the almost day long investment in time it takes if you have already been to NYC a few times and want to try something different, and free.
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| Times Square |
Seeing Letterman was pretty cool, but my real fascination was sitting in the Ed Sullivan Theatre 40 some years after the Beatles first played there. The interior remains almost unscathed from that era and I was taken aback at how actually small and intimate the venue was and what it must have been like to have been fortunate enough to have witnessed that piece of history,
You cannot overstate the impact that first performance had on the music industry and popular culture in general. Virtually every big act in the decades to come had some sort of lineage to that Sunday night in February 1964. Springsteen, Elton John, Roger McQuinn, Hendrix, KISS, Oasis, U2, et al, and yes even the likes of Simpson’s creator Matt Groening, drew inspiration from that seminal moment in time. So did I.
And that was the core of our trip to the Big Apple (bad pun intended).
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