On Friday we tried to visit the Met, but only had about an hour as we had a reservation for the Landmark Cruise from Pier 83 at 5pm.
We ended up accidentally eating lunch at the Met employee cafeteria, which was surprisingly delicious.
On our way to Pier 83 we walked through Central Park and down the east side of the island.
The boat ride was very cold, but the sun was setting and the lights of the tall buildings on the island were starting to glow. However, by the time we turned the corner and headed past Brooklyn the rain started to pour, turning the rest of the ride into an exercise in finding the few dry shielded spots outside.
It was also an exercise in trying to squeeze good shots out of a camera in motion, in the rain and at night. It was the first test of how far I can push this new camera (although there’s probably a lot of the functions I probably don’t know yet). Unfortunately because the a7 is so capable with ISO it tends to push it up really high in low (or no) light. I can’t stand noise in my photos, so I had to go into manual mode and experiment with shutter speeds, cranking ISO down and down the lowest I could go and still get something that wasn’t blurry. However, when you’re boating through fog and rain it’s hard to tell if those faraway lights in your photos are blurry or not. So, I just experimented and took hundreds and hundreds of photos at different settings and only a few of them still arrived intact after a proper lightroom review. To get some idea, I shot about 1,200 photos on this trip, most on the boat – and the flickr album for this trip contains less than 300 photos.
After hopping off the boat we headed to the lower east side to meet our friends for dinner at Luzzo’s, a place we’d gone with them three and a half years earlier and remembered for it’s great pizza.
After that they took us to Milk for corn flake flavored ice cream, and then it was back to their apartment to talk about big life-changing events. They had some big news to share with us, which I can’t really talk about, but will say it might result in another very long international flight in a year or two – and maybe no more NYC trips for a good long time.
(UPDATE: Now that time has passed I can reveal that they were moving to Singapore)
