In late September 2022, Shruthi and I headed up to NYC for a friend's wedding. We decided to get in early to hit up some spots before the wedding on Saturday. We arrived at our other friend's, CJ's, place, Thursday afternoon. His place is in the heart of Chelsea so lots of very "hip" places were nearby.
I recently picked up an Olympus XA2 from a local camera repair shop in Houston I wanted to try out. One quirk about this camera is that it only has what they call "zone" focusing. This means it has three focusing distances: close, medium, landscape. Each distance has a certain amount of tolerance before your subject becomes out of focus. In my testing, I've found that only the medium and landscape distances seem to work. The close focusing always misses. These old, cheap, point and shoots are known to have these issues and it's all part of the analog camera journey.
We headed to Chelsea Market, which was literally next door to CJ's place for lunch, and explored a bit of the city. Little Island was right down the street as well and I brought my little Olympus XA2 to capture some of the NYC skyline.
Little Island was so cool. It had really good views of the NYC skyline and the Hudson. The weather was perfect and the sun was out so the views were amazing to soak in.
After Little Island we headed to the Highline, which was also right by CJ's place. More views and amazing NYC weather. Coming from the sweltering heat of Texas, the change of pace was very welcome.
I only brought black and white film with me to NYC. I felt that the city views didn't need color as much as nature would. I am not used to black and white film (as you can probably tell through the photos) so it's also a bit of a learning curve to try to anticipate how images will look with the absence of color.
Thursday evening, CJ had a work event to hit while Shruthi and I got dinner with an old friend. The pizza was over the top and honestly subpar but the company was great and I decided to test out a new film stock I've never used before: P3200 Tmax. This film is a 3200 ISO black and white film. With an ISO that high, and a lens aperture of f/1.4 on my Mintolta X700, I felt comfortable to take night photos without a tripod.
Obviously these shots have a lot of film grain behind them but being able to take photos on film with almost no light felt like a superpower.
We decided to stay in Thursday night. Made some drinks at CJ's apartment and packed it in early. After travel and doing so much we were beat.
The next day, Shruthi and CJ spent the day working while I watched the Laver Cup (Roger Federer's final professional match ever!). We don't have the tennis channel in Houston so watching live tennis was so great for me. In the evening, we walked over to the San Gennaro Italian street festival. It was basically an entire street with tons of food vendors (and even some carnival games and rides).
To be perfectly honest, the food was subpar and the street was mind bogglingly crowded. We were packed in like sardines and it felt like it went on forever. Eventually, we just called it and walked down to a bar for some drinks. Here are some more night time images from the walk over.
I don't remember the name of the first bar we hit. It was pretty crowded and we had to sit at the bar so chatting with the entire group was challenging. We had one drink here and moved to Houston Hall which had much more space and tables.
The next day, we had a picnic with some old friends and traveled over to JFK for the wedding. I didn't take any film photos after Friday night but the wedding was amazing and the hotel we stayed at was called the TWA Hotel, which was an old airline. Such a unique hotel. Everything had a super retro vibe and they even repurposed an old plane for their bar. Expensive stay but worth checking out if you can!
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