On my Father’s Day Weekend visit to NYC I finally got to see some MoMA exhibits I’d wanted to see for months. First off was a Picasso exhibit called “Variations”. Ever since my parents took me to the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, FL six years ago, I’ve been very interested in painters – especially artists from the 1930s-1950s and the surrealist and associated movements. Also, as a person of Spanish heritage, I’ve had a special interest in artists from the region. So I was very excited to see this Picasso exhibit.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Luna Park, the new section of Coney Island”] [/caption]

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I went to NYC over Father’s Day weekend to see the Mermaid Parade. Well, as if that wasn’t crazy enough, I went BACK to Coney Island that night to photograph the new Luna Park. I have been documenting the changes to Coney Islan d and so I wanted to document the aftermath. I took both of the digital cameras I had used that afternoon and proceeded to take some low light photos. I would have preferred to have gone a little earlier in the evening to take the photos, but we thought it might have been a little crowded. By the time we went, it wasn’t too crowded, but there were still plenty of people still in their mermaid costumes hanging around.

In reading the New York Daily Photo Blog, I happened to come across a post about the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. I mentioned to my wife that I wanted to try and attend next time it happened. Being the awesome wife that she is, she kept her eye out for the date and let me know it would coincide with Father’s Day weekend this year. So we decided to get a two-for-one deal and go to NYC to see the parade.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“People came to Otakon from all around the USA”] [/caption]

For the first time since moving here, I found out about Otakon ahead of time. Unfortunately, the economics didn’t work out we didn’t buy tickets. But I did go to hang out outside Otakon on Saturday to get some photos. Lessons learned:

• Remember what you learned in Hawaii and don’t be afraid to approach people. This is especially the case with Otakon. The cosplayers have spent a long time working on their costumes, sometimes up to a whole year. They want to show off their costumes. So go up to them and ask to photograph them.
• With a 1.6x crop factor camera like the Canon 400D, 28mm is not wide enough. It’s very, very crowded at Otakon. They had something like 19 000 preregistered attendees. I missed out on getting some awesome shots of costumes such as this one where the girl on the left had an amazing bottom part to her costume, but I couldn’t fit her and her friend in without backing up a lot more
• Buy tickets to Otakon! I missed out on a bunch of costumes because they were walking into the conference too quickly for me to intercept them at the door. So attend so you can see all the costumes

And now here is my photo essay on Otakon 2009.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Yankee Stadium from the Train Station”] [/caption]

Ever since I’ve known my wife I wanted to go to a Yankees Game. But we were often busy during the baseball season and neither of us are big ball fans. In fact, this was also my wife’s first Yankee game despite having grown up in NYC and rooted for the Yankees her whole life. So it was to my great dismay that I found out I would never get to see a Yankees game in the original stadium that housed Babe Ruth. However, I finally did make it to a Yankee game after nearly a decade. It was a bit of a taunt to see the old stadium right next to the new one as demolition has not yet taken place.

The Huge Mess

Danielle and I bought our first home near the end of February.  We’ve moved many times before - between semesters at Cornell, from Cornell to Tampa, and from Tampa to Baltimore.  Now we were finally moving into our own home.  And so, for the first time, I decided to thoroughly document our move.  I was partly inspired by photo blogs I’ve been reading recently, such as Jeffry Friedl’s blog.  I decided to put together a photo essay.  So I whipped out my cameras and started shooting.