This is part of my NYC Tet Travelogue.

See part one here.

See part two here.

?this was originally written on 14 Feb 2010

Life sure is strange.  This morning I was sure I’d be buying a Holga today.  After talking to Danielle, it even seemed that SHE would get one too.  She wanted to have one loaded with color film and one loaded with black and white film.  Then she asked a few questions.  I can’t remember the exact words, but it got me thinking.  Do I REALLY want a Holga?  I mean, the biggest attraction for me was the ability to medium format film.  As I mentioned on 12 Feb, it’s a connection with the past and a chance to shoot with better film than I ever did.  But the more I looked at other photographers’ Lomo results, the more I wondered if this was how I wanted to re-experience film.  What put me off the most is the fact that the results are so random.  I don’t understand how people go on vacations to places as far away as Asia with a Lomo as their sole means of capturing their experiences.  They could be getting completely blown out photos the whole time and come back without any photo memories.

One in 1,600,000.  That’s odds of randomly meeting someone I know in NYC excluding my wife’s family.  And yet, due to construction on the Q line, Danielle and I found ourselves on the bus with Katy Ho, who we hadn’t seen since graduation.

I’ve often remarked to my wife that it was odd we hadn’t seen any friends in New York.  And she always reminds me that New York has eight million people and the likelihood of anyone we know being in the same place as us is pretty slim.  I know this is true, but I strangely feel as if New York is a more intimate place.  I think it has to do with the fact that because there are eight million people there, you’re almost never walking alone on a street.  The city seems to be overflowing with people and it seems inevitable that you’d meet someone you know by chance.  But that’s just an example of how bad the human mind is at figuring out probability.  Katy was coming home from yoga and dinner with some friends.  And if the train tracks hadn’t been under construction, we would never have met up.

A few weeks ago I took yet another stroll on Brighton Beach’s Boardwalk.  This famous boardwalk goes from Brighton Beach past Coney Island all the way to Seagate.  This time around I took some iconic photos from the area.  In other words, these are exactly the types of photos you would see included in any survey of boardwalk photos. Here’s the GPS track of where I went in a static PNG and then as a Google Map so you can zoom in and scroll around.