The Best Place in NYC

Several years ago I became obsessed with the Highline, an elevated train track on the west side of Manhattan that use to service the meatpacking district but has not been in use since 1980. There are a lot of reasons why it is one of my favorite places in NYC. I have been up there, trespassing as it is private property, several times and have taken a lot of photos. My most recent venture was in early August and I was able to get some good pictures of the construction transforming it from an abandoned railroad tracks to a fantastic park. Below is a video of how the park will be constructed.

Here are a bunch of other videos that go into detail about the history and the evolution of the Highline. Also here is a slideshow of the final design.

This post start when I saw this post on the highline blog offering a great aerial photo as desktop wallpaper. Generally, I hate wallpaper, of the wall variety and of the screen variety but this one is great and is up on my computer. I may take another venture up on the Highline next weekend and take some more pictures showing the progress of the construction. There is one thing I hope the designers do not remove and that is all the great graffiti that has built up over the years. The wall below is right below 23rd street.

Here is a large view. This photo was about 15-20 photos stitched together using a free photo stitching software so please ignore the stupid watermarks.

50th Post

Just got back home from Atlantic City playing mostly poker and didn't get anything good going this trip. Oh well that is how tournament poker goes. I think I played good for the most part and can analyze and learn from my mistakes. I was able to make a little money playing craps when a girl was rolling and hit a hard 4 for me which I had $5 and I parlayed the $50 and later in the roll she hit the hard 4 again which paid me $500. Weeeee, I love craps it is a fun game when someone is rolling hot.

I love the feeling of coming home from a trip mostly because I love this city so much. The t-shirt above is a limited edition shirt that was designed for the new Standard Hotel above the High Line that will be opening soon. It was designed by Eric Haze, a legendary NYC graffiti artist (you can see some of his work here). I want one of those t-shirts.

I have a ton of stuff to read as I didn't do much google reader checking the past week and so I am sure I will have a lot to post/comment on. 

In the mean time I am off to wholefoods to get some cookies and eat some dinner and you can listen to some of these random songs below:

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OK I'll stop now cuz I can go on and on.

Walking

As a small hobby I have been taking photos for some time and I mostly upload to flickr. I have played around with trying to do some different things with photos like my highline montage with 36 different photos layered on each other to create one huge piece or this photo which was 10 different pictures stitched together using software to make one panoramic photo. Now I am trying to create a type of stop motion movie with photos. My first attempt is below of me walking.  I used movie maker and it seems kind of crude but it will have to do since I don't want to invest in software.

I really want to try to mount my camera on my bike and set it to take a picture every 5 seconds and see how that works out.