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[Update: The original shot I posted was, I thought, too light. This is an updated version.] Another shot from my tours of Battery Park City. If you’re getting sick of said locale, I’ll tell you, you’re not alone. I’m not feeling uninspired there or anything — quite the opposite, really — but when I browse my images afterward I feel like so many of them have the same fences, lightposts, bricks, and/or benches and it gets a little repetitive. But, when I try going somewhere else (two days ago I took a walk around Union Square and then the Upper East and West Sides) I don’t take many photos at all, whereas when I go to my “stomping grounds,” as it were, I fill my 1GB memory card. Which got me thinking — ruminating, if you will.

I realized that I don’t take very good pictures — or even take any at all — in a place that I don’t understand. I suppose it’s a photojournalistic thing, but, for instance, in Union Square, I couldn’t really get a hold on the people there or what they were thinking or how a photo could show the life that undoubtedly fills that place. And that is, after all, what I’m trying to capture: life. So when I can’t get a feel for it, the pictures I take rapidly turn into generic aesthetic patterns that don’t really evoke what I want them to evoke. And so I end up hitting the trash can button on my camera a lot.

On the other hand, like me and my Battery Park City, when I’m comfortable in a place, it means I’ve already come to understand what it is and what the people are doing there, so I can fire at will with the shutter. And I do.

The main caveat being, of course, becoming too comfortable with a spot (something I experienced both in La Crosse and at Middlebury and at my cabin), because it’s precisely then that I stop noticing the things that I need to notice to keep on bringing the camera to my eye. When I was up at my cabin, I took the house, the driveway, the boats, the lake — even the wildlife — for granted as always being there and always having been there. When I looked at the woodshed, I didn’t think how a cool angle would make the light bounce a certain way or if I got really close the grains in the logs would form a pattern. I would just say, “yep, there’s the woodshed” and move on. And on and on.

Thus, I’ve set out trying to understand different places. I’m starting to get a handle on the Financial District (inland), so I’m pretty satisfied with some of the shots I got today, and I feel like if I went back to the Upper West Side I’d know what to look for there, too. Right now, though, it’s mostly the landscape around my apartment.

There was one shot that I really would have liked to take last night, though, but I didn’t have my camera because I was out with Chorn and Craigulate: Near Union Square (we decided to go out near NYU), a woman was sitting crosslegged in front of a deli-type place, slumped over and passed out, her hands splaying out in front of her onto the sidewalk. The coolest thing about her was that she had been smoking a cigarette before she passed out and the cigarette was on the ground — still burning — between where her fingers would have been holding it. I was mad that I didn’t have any way to take a picture, so I’m going back tomorrow in the hopes that I’ll find something similar.