Little Italy and the Empire State Building
I’ve already posted the second of these pictures on Facebook but wanted to get them here on the blog as well, and send them to Instagram. We drove up to Manhattan Friday morning for a wedding tomorrow (stay tuned for a picture of the bride and groom for tomorrow’s picture). We got here at about 1:30 and after getting settled into our hotel room we walked around a bit. Then, after another break, we headed out to find a place for dinner. We decided on Italian and since we were on the edge of Little Italy, we thought that would be a good choice. As it happens, a bunch of the streets in Little Italy are closed to all but pedestrian traffic on weekends throughout the summer, starting today. This is the view north on Mulberry Street with the Empire State Building in the distance. As you can see, the place was hopping. We got a table at the early end of dinner time, which was nice because we hadn’t had lunch. Not the cheapest place in the world but pretty good food.
Williamsburg Bridge at Sunset
After dinner we walked north a little bit and then east, heading out onto the Williamsburg Bridge. Traffic into town was pretty backed up but of course we were on foot, so that didn’t make any difference. There was a fair amount of bicycle traffic heading towards Brooklyn. The sun was setting in the west and it’s a bit tricky to get a picture of the bridge because of the fence and girders to keep people from climbing up onto the bridge. Past the bridge tower I was able to look up and see the tower.
This picture turned out quite well, I think. Both pictures for this post were actually three exposures taken in rapid succession and three different shutter speeds (one under exposed, one as metered, and the last over exposed). Then, I have software that combines the three into a single image, allowing a much greater amount of dynamic range, which is why the process is called High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography.
To get really good pictures of a place you normally need to be there for an extended period, but I think I managed to get two pretty reasonable pictures today, which makes me pretty happy.