New York City

At last I decided to write something about my last trip to New York City (NYC). New York City, many times it is called the financial capital of the world. New York City in my eyes is all about people and structures. Probably you would see people from all over the world in same place. The beauty of such diversity was so striking I was puzzled. People are beautiful. Later, I learn from wiki that almost more than 800 languages are spoken in New York City! 800 hundred languages! I did not even know that many languages exist!

Almost first thing anyone notices is business. Literally everyone is running, later in our (me & my friends) trip we realized, we are running as well (probably conditional reflex)! I feel like everyone is busy and they don't have a second to waste. The business of people was drastically striking. I have heard people of big cities are busy but I had no idea this is what they called business. In my eyes they are not busy they are racing with time. This is insanity.

The diversity! There is nothing to talk about diversity of NYC. Every second person is different. If you stand on a busy intersection, and look at the people waiting to cross the street, you would probably see hundred different people from hundred different places and no one has time to pay attention to the next person. Business could be a good ingredient for peaceful coexistence of such extremely diverse population. Now I know what diversity means.

NYC is a city of skyscrapers. It is a small city in terms of land but it is the largest one in terms of population. The only way to accommodate is grow upward, that's what they did. NYC grew upward. Gigantic structures are representing the glory of NYC.  Many times it is really difficult to look at the top of the buildings, they are simply not clearly visible. I tried my best to capture the people and structures of NYC in my poor camera. I shared some them here.

 

New York City in my eyes

Street photography!

I have been editing some street photographs from our last New York trip. This is first time I tries some street photography. It is fun, it is absolute fun. I mean taking pictures is okay but post processing was super interesting. There are people in the photographs, they have real emotions and my job is to pop them out. I had no idea it would so much fun. Sometimes I spend hours on one character; more interestingly I found myself talking with them! Some of the character has such as great impact you just cannot go away. I am super novice on street photography and I had no idea it is so much fun. Usually I got strong emotion in one out of thousand; but the thing is that picture is mind blowing. I just can look at that picture and spend entire day talking with them.

Few strong characters have so much to tell, creating artificial lighting to make them louder and stronger is absolute fun. You can literally talk to them. I think I am loving it. Now I need to learn how to take better photographs on the street, so that I don't have to throw away thousands. Here is one of my favorites,

She has all her thoughts in her mind while walking toward work. Well, it's a made up story but don't you think the story goes pretty well with the photographs. That's the beauty of street photography. You can tell whatever you want to tell. Your job is to make the characters strong enough to tell whatever you want them to tell.

Philadelphia, once again!

Philadelphia again! This time it is a whole different story. We were planning for New York tour and all of a sudden we realized that flying to Philadelphia is comparatively cheaper than flying to New York; and it was just two hours road trip from Philadelphia to New York. So we extend our excursion by one day and made a plan to spend some time in Philadelphia. Last time I could not spend time to enjoy the urban beauty. Yes, Philadelphia is a nice city and we loved it. More specifically we loved it more than New York. If I have to choice to choose between New York and Philadelphia, the choice is obvious. I love Philadelphia. If I am asked to describe Philadelphia is one sentence, I would say "where history meets present." Philadelphia is actually one of those city where I always wanted to visit. It is the city of brotherly love, yes you can feel it in Philadelphia. You would not feel alienated there.

Philadelphia is full of history. History of American independence. History of great people who shared the vision of a great country. History is so much of Philadelphia that sometimes it is difficult to separate the history from present. They (people of Philadelphia) have the tendency to do things that can blend with history seamlessly. I was  even more amazed by the design of the city. Somehow the city hall can be seen from many different places with entirely different kinds of view. Hope we could spend more time there. I took lots of pictures and most of them are crap. I had to delete most of them and the rest are not good either but at least they will testify our expedition.

The City of Brotherly Love