Richard’s Notes

New York, New York. Mamen came to visit Anne and me in May and among many other photo outings we spent a day in New York.

I’ll never forget how thrilled she was when we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, it just tickled her to be out there looking back at Manhattan. She’s in Spain for much of the summer but this is my way of acknowledging the great time we had together and that I miss regular contact with my friend, who also happens to be one of my photographic mentors.

Note: I borrowed Mamen’s Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L lens for these images. I love that lens and was sorry to give it back to her when she left. It’s on my B&H wishlist, among others.

Mamen was like a kid in a candy store on the Brooklyn Bridge. She loved everything about it including the stonework on the towers whch she’s shooting here.

Walking east toward Brooklyn as the sun goes down behind me. The wide angle lens makes the web of cables on Brooklyn Bridge even more interesting.

Each of the Brooklyn Bridge’s two towers has two Equilateral pointed arches and when you consider that it was built in 1870 you start to think about what might have been involved in moving the stone out to these towers and making the arches. It was a massive construction project. Amazingly, the towers are beautiful even to this day.

Looking back at Manhattan from the east (Brooklyn) tower of the Brooklyn Bridge as it gets dark.

Mamen and I decided we wanted to work a bit on capturing moving cars while at the same time getting a stable context for them to be moving in. Neither of us had done shots like this before so it took us a while to work through how to do it. She finally figured it out and I followed her lead. We spend over an hour with these shots until I realized that the last train out of Grand Central that would get us back to where my truck was parked was going to leave in 45 minutes and here we were on the bridge! We ran back across and bumped into some great folks from Spain we’d met on the bridge who were also going to Grand Central. We flagged a cab and made it just in time. Ah, the excitement of New York.